Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.
And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
Programmers can be lazy.
"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.
The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.