It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.