Brian Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who spent his career at Bell Labs, where he co-created the AWK programming language and co-authored the definitive book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. His writing style influenced Larry Wall's documentation of Perl, though Kernighan's restraint stands in deliberate contrast to Wall's exuberance.

Kernighan is the most underrated figure in the history of computing education. He did not invent a language or an operating system, but he taught generations of programmers how to think about the ones that matter.