You encounter a crusty old-timer who tells you how great programming used to be: the computer just did what you told it. Languages were simple and easy to understand. In awe, you ask: “Did you write FORTRAN? or assembly?” The old-timer laughs: he’s not that old. He started with C! It’s common to think of C and other “old” languages as being “close to the machine,” but that’s because the Unix abstractions have become so ubiquitous that we no longer think of them as abstractions.