You've been around the development of some of the formative influences on the Internet such as UNIX, what do you see as the driving influences of contemporary computing and the way the world connects?
For better or worse, the driving influence today seems to be to get something up and running and used via the Internet, as quickly as possible. A good idea, however simple in retrospect, can give one fame and fortune (witness Google, Facebook, Twitter, and any number of others). But this only works because there is infrastructure: open source software like Unix/Linux and GNU tools and web libraries, dirt-cheap hardware, and essentially free communications. We're seeing an increase in scalable systems as well, like Amazon's web services, where one can start very small and grow rapidly and without real limits as the need arises. It's starting to look like the Multics idea of an information utility.
AWK and AMPL languages are two you have been involved in developing. Are there any languages you would have liked to have helped develop?
Well, it's always nice to have been part of a successful project, so naturally I would like to have helped with everything good. But I've been quite lucky in the handful that I was involved in. Most of that comes from having first-rate collaborators (Al Aho and Peter Weinberger for AWK and Bob Fourer and Dave Gay for AMPL).
Which companies/individuals would you point to as doing great things for the society at present through computer sciences?
I might single out Bill and Melinda Gates for their foundation, made possible by the great success of Microsoft. Their charitable work is aimed at tough but potentially solvable problems and operates on a scale that few others can approach. After that, one might name Google, which has made so much information so readily accessible; that access has changed the world greatly and is likely to continue to do so.
What are you views on the following languages: Perl, Java, and Ruby?
I use Java some; it's the standard language for introductory computing at Princeton and lots of other places. I find it bulky and verbose but it flows pretty smoothly once I get going. I don't use Perl much at this point — it's been replaced by Python in my personal working set — but no other language matches the amount of computation that can be packed into so few characters. I have not written much Ruby; it clearly has a lot of appeal and some intriguing ideas, but so far when I have to write a program quickly some other more familiar language gets used just to get the job done. But one of these days, I'll add Ruby to the list.
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