When I hear the words "social responsibility," I want to reach for my gun.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

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.

Of 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

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.