9 Programming....................................................................
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.”—AnonymousIf 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: [email protected] (Thomas M. Breuel)It is true that languages like Scheme, Smalltalk, and Common Lisp
come with powerful programming environments.