4 ms·

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

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?

TylerE 11y ago
Remember that that's inluding like 60 pages of what are basically printed man pages.
- unwind 11y ago
  When K&R was written, it's not a given that the man pages for C functions already existed, is it?
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    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/u_man/man3 http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=pdp11v/usr/man/...
    - dagw 11y ago
      System III's functions section was pretty full by 1983 K&R was published in 1978