This guy and rms and probably a bunch of other people grew up hacking Lisp in collaborative settings, which I&#x27;d humbly propose is a mind-altering, psychedelic experience. They probably look at everything that happened since 1974 with weary unexcited eyes. Come on fellas, look at Doug Engelbart, look at all the stuff we had at MIT, look at Smalltalk, what are you kids even doing?<p>rpg, I think, is more of some kind of poetic libertarian personality, compared to rms. So rpg will focus on the poetic aspects of Lisp hacking, exhilarating experiences, beauty, pattern languages, and stuff. Whereas rms went in a more ethical direction; he experienced the Lisp freedom as being most directly an ethical concern threatened by secretive competitive businessmen, and so to protect the hacker spirit it was urgently necessary to create a copylefted set of core tools, and that is his entire mission.<p>rms says, for example, that GNOME is a successful project, because it is a decently satisfactory desktop environment that is copylefted and open to change. From an experiential standpoint, however, GNOME on GNU&#x2F;Linux is a miserable dungeon of despair, as far as I can tell, if you want to actually hack on it, because it&#x27;s all written in C.<p>I was in a chatroom last week where somebody was talking about how they had an idea for a change they wanted to make to the Gimp, I&#x27;m not sure what but they were eager to do some hacking.<p>But they couldn&#x27;t get the autotools to work... then there was some missing dev dependency... then something else was wrong... then they tried using Nix to get a dev environment but that failed too... a few hours later they said &quot;fuck it&quot; and probably went to watch TV, or to punch a wall.<p>I was a teenager when I tried to hack on GNOME. Actually I did get a few patches in. I revamped the UI for their PDF reader, that was the highlight of my youthful career in free software. I just wanted to contribute. But it was so fucking boring and I&#x27;m never doing anything like that again. Just getting the change you wanted to be installed on your own system is a nightmare. Are you going to pack it into a new .deb? I don&#x27;t know, maybe things have changed.<p>Pretty sure rms doesn&#x27;t use GNOME. I don&#x27;t think he even uses X. Probably because he doesn&#x27;t understand it. Because you can&#x27;t. Because it&#x27;s huge and complex and boring and practically impossible to change.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;stallman-computing.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;stallman-computing.html</a><p>Emacs is an enormous contrast. You can change anything easily. It&#x27;s an entirely different experience. It&#x27;s actually fun to modify.<p>This is turning into more of a rant than I imagined.<p>I enjoy thinking about the psycho-social realities of open software development. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if the people at GitHub decided that their basic website is done &amp; finished and they all took some LSD and came up with some interesting ideas. Or what if rms and rpg got over whatever political quibbles they probably have and did a weekend retreat with lots of oolong tea and wrote a manifesto for inspired computing. Or what if people just had spare time to work at anything but making money.