The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

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.

I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.