Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I wonder how long it took Kernighan and Ritchie to write 'The C Programming Language'? Amazon says the 2nd edition (1988) is 272 pages long but looking back, it felt like it was 80 pages :) Going by the OP's math (of the language creator being twice as productive) prolly 4 months?


Remember that that's inluding like 60 pages of what are basically printed man pages.


When K&R was written, it's not a given that the man pages for C functions already existed, is it?


They were, albeit potentially more terse than is available now. System III's functions section was pretty full by 1983 even [1].

[1] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=pdp11v/usr/man/...


System III's functions section was pretty full by 1983

K&R was published in 1978




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: