Kernighan, Brain. Brian Wilson Kernighan is a computer scientist from Canada. He worked at Bell Labs and helped to design Unix with its creators, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language, one of the Unix operating system’s developers, and co-author of the book The C Programming Language; he was the ‘R’ in K&R (a popular reference to the book’s writers Kernighan and Ritchie).