9 Programming Hold Still, This Won’t Hurt a Bit “Do not meddle in the affairs of Unix, for it is subtle and quick to core dump.” —Anonymous If you learned about programming by writing C on a Unix box, then you may find this chapter a little mind-bending at first. The sad fact is that Unix has so completely taken over the worldwide computer science educational establishment that few of today’s students realize that Unix’s blunders are not, in fact, sound design decisions. For example, one Unix lover made the following statement when defend- ing Unix and C against our claims that there are far more powerful lan- guages than C and that these languages come with much more powerful and productive programming environments than Unix provides: Date: 1991 Nov 9 From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) It is true that languages like Scheme, Smalltalk, and Common Lisp come with powerful programming environments.