> At the time, a lot of systems were written in pure assembler, and it took a long time to convince those guys that C was ready as a replacement for most tasks (and C changed dramatically in that time period).

And they were wrong to resist C. They should have switched over sooner.

> today with all these things built on top (financial markets, governments, big mega-corps, small ma n' pa shops, etc...), we need slower changes in order to keep the stability.

Stuart Feldman, on why Makefiles insist on tabs:

"After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history…"

Stability is important, but eventually you do have to go back and fix things that are wrong for us to move forward.