This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My
favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works
everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about.
+1 I would add, to me that's what the 'standardization' efforts were really about as a >>user<<. To settle on the minimum subset needed to the get the job do and stop adding 'sugar' because you could. The ISVs wanted to maximize (SPEC1170 et al), but to me 'Universal' was what do I really need/use every day.
In fact, its why I switch from EMACS to vi early in my UNIX career. Vi and (ed) were everywhere (K&P style). EMACS was not and if I found a flavor for that system, it was always 'different.' I could sit down at anything from MS-DOS to a Cray and stuff worked well enough that I could do what I needed to do. [I'm not a great fan of "vim" for that reason either BTW -- I just want the basics to 'be there' and 'be reliable' - do what I want without me having to rethink].