I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.

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

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate