For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
Eric S. RaymondWhen writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
Eric S. RaymondOf course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C
Eric S. Raymond