"He's done a marvelous job keeping what could potentially dry subject material interesting," says Brad D.D. Leupen '97, a TF for CS 50. "He's just very nice and one of the most accessible men I've ever talked to."

Kernighan's most important task in teaching CS 50 is to convey the intricacies of the C programming language.

"Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence," Kernighan says. "It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do."

"Like any language, it has rules of grammar and rules of how you create legal sentences," he says. "This language is very precise."

Kernighan says he tries to encourage questions during lecture because he believes that is the way to make people learn.

"I try very hard to answer questions," he says. "It's what makes the class interesting. Otherwise [students] would be bored out of their minds."

Kernighan says one of the significant difficulties he has to deal with in the class is that students with a wide range of computer backgrounds are taking CS 50 since there is no other introductory computer science class.

He says he deals with the various levels of experience the best way he can.

"I try to cover what I think is important, and some of that is an enormous amount of detail," Kernighan says.

He says he could not get through the course without the help of the TFs.

"The other thing that makes the course work are the TFs," he says. "They are astonishing."

Credit Where Credit is Due

Since his arrival at Harvard, Kernighan says he has noticed that he has received a great deal of attention.

"As far as I can tell, everybody is giving me more credit than I deserve," Kernighan says.

But this "undue" credit has worked to his advantage.