Lisp and Smalltalk existed before the C language, and don't have its damning flaws. Ada's also much nicer. As for the operating system, there are currently no good such systems that aren't very old. I use Emacs to largely avoid the UNIX sh. Ideally, a university would have its own operating system, but I suppose that would be too hard, in comparison to accreting another layer of shit over UNIX. Something such as Alan Kay's VPRI would be best: http://vpri.org
I didn't go to a university to learn anything about computers, fortunately.
Today one of the best "Not really Unix, but close" it's called Guix(SD) and it's bound to Scheme. And without C, forget about having a kernel and a Scheme compiler.
The best env to complete SICP it's, paradoxically, a Unix like system written in C with an Scheme DSL to set up the system declarativelly.
