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I was reading the book <The Art of Unix Programming>

There is one line claiming

The three and a half decades between 1969 and 2003 is a long time. Going by the historical trend curve in number of Unix sites during that period, probably somewhere upwards of fifty million man-years have been plowed into Unix development worldwide.

That's (50million man-year / 35 year) = (1.47 million man-year / year) goes into Unix development during that period. It means 1.47 million developers worked on Unix system yearly.

Personally I find the number a bit hard to believe. Or am I understanding the number in the wrong way?

Karl Xu
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  • Your concern seems valid. – Marcus Müller Jun 13 '21 at 12:57
  • Where is the 1.47 million number coming from? Your quote mentions 50, not 1.47. Also, I suspect this means "people developing on Unix" rather than "people involved in developing Unix itself". Given that the vast majority of servers in the world run some sort of nix, I wouldn't be too surprised if there are indeed many millions of programmers who have worked in nix environments in those 35 years. – terdon Jun 13 '21 at 13:51
  • @terdon Updated the question according to the comment. – Karl Xu Jun 13 '21 at 14:31
  • @terdon If the Unix development is interpreted in the way of engineers write code goes into *nix code base + engineers write code on top of *nix, then the number seems like reasonable. Thanks for the explanation. – Karl Xu Jun 13 '21 at 14:34
  • I used Unix/Linux for most of a 50 year career. When I found a bug, I generated a fix and sent it in. Twice. How much of my 50 years is counted as "development effort"? 98% of all free floating statistics are made up. – waltinator Jun 13 '21 at 15:34

2 Answers2

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The quote is a footnote from in the preface of the book. More concrete in this excerpt:

[…] the Unix culture has an unwritten engineering tradition that has developed over literally millions of man-years[1] of skilled effort. This book is written in the belief that understanding that tradition, and adding its design patterns to your toolkit, will help you become a better programmer and designer.

[1] The three and a half decades between 1969 and 2003 is a long time. Going by the historical trend curve in number of Unix sites during that period, probably somewhere upwards of fifty million man-years have been plowed into Unix development worldwide.

From question:

It means 1.47 million developers worked on Unix system yearly.

That depends on how one interpret "worked on" as well as what is meant by Unix. It is not about developing the Unix systems themselves, though of course these are also included. It is about using Unix as a platform for development. It being universities, companies, timeshares, servers, devices, personal and so on where *nix[2] is and has been used.

More widely the book is about the Unix(-like) development culture, philosophy and design.

[2] I use *nix here as the author talks about systems far beyond proprietary UNIX in the book. For example: "the rise of Linux and other open-source Unixes (such as the modern BSD variants)."
Also see Is Linux a Unix?, which also links to Why is there a * When There is Mention of Unix Throughout the Internet?

ibuprofen
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There's no such thing as "man-year per year" -- just like "kilowatts-hour per hour", it's nonsense.

But that's probably the point of your question.

Anyways, that guy was a bit exagerating by assuming that everybody using Unix was actually contributing to its development. That's a bit like summing up great the contribution of rat labs as so many "millions of lives dedicated to science"; correct, but not exactly what one could assume from the title.

fair and balanced
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  • Updated the question according to the comment There's no such thing as "man-year per year". – Karl Xu Jun 13 '21 at 14:37
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    You are reading it wrong .The book and the quote talk about "people using Unix as a development platform" not how many that had worked on developing the core Unix system. It is about Unix development culture, philosophy and design. – ibuprofen Jun 13 '21 at 15:15