This is a significant reason that many Unix hackers prefer languages like C or Common Lisp where the same symbol means the same thing system-wide. Plain text grep, sed, and ex commands make refactoring quite simple and don't require fancy plugins to figure out what a name means in a given context.
> "This is a significant reason that many Unix hackers prefer languages like C or Common Lisp where the same symbol means the same thing system-wide."
I don't know about lisp, but that's not even close to true for C. typedef struct A { int A; } A; is an easy counter example and that doesn't even take into account macros or any of the other tools that play horribly with grep and friends.
The reason Unix hackers prefer C is because it's rock solid, extremely well supported and plays nicely with hardware. And it doesn't hurt that it's old enough and popular enough that a huge number of people have extensive experience with it.
