Talk:The Unix Programming Environment

Publication Date
The body says 1984 but the box on the left hand side says 1994? Are these different dates of publication or is one a typo? If the prior, it would be useful to clarify. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.114.196.226 (talk) 20:48, 4 May 2015 (UTC)


 * 84 is correct. Fixed the infobox, thanks for spotting this! Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 09:37, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

= EXTREMELY BAD = I remember reading this article a while back as a good article. I came back to it to find it: a) subjective or opinionated b) written like a magazine article or review c) written in an informal manner d) written so that it did not look like the other articles I finished fixing these problems. I AM KEEPING AN EYE ON THIS ONE! - PGSONIC 13:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Broken Link
I found the 'home page' link was broken, but a quick Google search found an on-line version, so I replaced the broken link with the new link.

Looking at it, though, I'm not sure it's the same book. It's dated 2001, for a start, there is Perl but no 'hoc' and no mention of Kernighan and Pike, or Prentice-Hall.

Feel free to delete the link, but there seems no point in reverting to the previous one. I'll amend the article to emphasize that the 'on-line' version just shares the same title. Pavium (talk) 12:49, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

The original link is not broken, it's just that bell labs server going down once in a while. It's up at the moment of writing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.122.181.93 (talk) 04:53, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Early book
The article now states that the book is '''considered an important and early document of the Unix operating system'''. While in some sense this is true, and I don't really know how to phrase it better, I'd like to point out that in many respects, this is not an early document. In 1984, Unix was fairly mature - it had been in development for 15 years (since 1969), it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal (SOSP) 10 years earlier (1974, "The UNIX Timesharing System"), and at least seven official editions of its manuals have been published (see Version 7 Unix). In 1984, several commercial and and academic variants of Unix have already existed (believe it or not, even one from Microsoft), and a year earlier Ritchie and Thompson have won the prestegious Turing Award for their work on Unix. If you read the book today, while some details have changed, much of the concepts and details in the book remain relevant - the book does not describe "early" Unix but rather a pretty mature Unix - Unix which was getting popular enough to deserve its own popular book published for the masses of new users which were coming in - including me - I learned Unix in 1984 using this book ;-) Nyh (talk) 12:45, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
 * To what I wrote above, I wanted to add that in many respects, not only wasn't 1984 an early stage of Unix's evolution, in some respects it was the end of Unix evolution, at least in Bell Labs: The important Unix variants already forked from AT&T's Research Unix earlier: System V was published in 1983, BSD was based on the 1979 Seventh Edition Unix (with, of course, many improvements) - and most commercial Unix variants were based on System V, BSD, or some combination of both. Eighth Edition Unix came out right after this book, and further development of Unix in Bell Labs (the Ninth and Tenth Edition) never made it anywhere - until it basically morphed into Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Nyh (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I wrote an "historical" context section with an edited and better linked version of the above, but someone keeps deleting it as "original research". This is ridiculous - most of the dates and facts I mentioned are already given in other articles I linked to, and while indeed more reference can be added, it's easy to add them - it's not stuff I made up. Moreover, not having this section means that readers think that this is an "early Unix book" which is plainly false - this book was written when Unix was already mature and becoming popular. Yes, "Linux" happened after this book. But Unix didn't. Unix - at least the thing that comes from Bell Labs - did not evolve much after this book came out. Nyh (talk) 07:48, 28 November 2016 (UTC)