AWK History / Nerd Culture.
July 30, 2003, 01:07 pmThere is an interview of Brian Kernighan (cocreator of AWK, old school programmer extraordinaire) on Linux Journal that I just read. I've never used AWK before, but I'd always wondered the etymology of the name. Kernighan gives an interesting, brief history:
AWK was a joint effort among Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and myself; the name is our initials. I think it's fair to say we were pretty equal in our contributions. Al knew all about regular expressions and the pattern-action paradigm; Peter knew about report generation and database issues; and I had a very clear idea of wanting to be able to handle string and numeric values and conversions between them as easily as possible. I'm pretty sure that Peter did the first implementation (which only took a couple of days), aside from regular expressions, which Al did; I have maintained and modified it on my own since about 1980. We wrote the AWK book together in 1987.
Later in the interview, he discusses his involvement in the naming of UNIX:
Yes, long ago. Multics was an acronym for something like Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, and it was big and complicated because it had many of everything. I suggested Unics for Ken's new system, because it was small and had at most one of anything. (Multi and uni are both Latin roots, so it was a very weak pun.) Someone else spelled it with the letter X; no one can remember who.
He also talks about his interests and work with typesetting tools. It's so interesting that so many UNIX-y nerds are into typesetting. Just look at the über-nerd Don Knuth with TEK and Digital Typography.