> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline.
Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age-correlated decline in some measures of programming ability, one cannot take those results and conclude that a specific programmer's ability began to decline at 30. Also, AFAIR the studies don't agree on a specific age and report increasing variance which makes it even less reasonable to make the conclusion the author made.
Stallman's carpal tunnel eventually became so bad, that he would dictate his code to students rather than endure the pain typing it himself. That was what they meant by his abilities declining.
The article is full of misrepresentations. First off, GCC was written from scratch (because the pastel compiler had some design issues), which is evidenced in the quote the author provides. However, the whole thing reads as a "we'd be better off without Stallman" piece, using words like "tired", *exhausted" and claiming that because Richard didn't write any papers on compilers that he must've not done many new things while writing GCC.
I'm not sure why the author seems to have a grudge against Stallman, but I'd invite them to reconsider.
>> Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multi-platform compiler developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, an extended version of Pascal...
I'm curious if the Pastel source code is available somewhere on the net...
"Compilers take a long time to mature. The first more or less stable release seems to be 1.17 (January 9, 1988) That was pure luck as in 1989 the Emacs/Xemacs split started that consumed all his energy. "
Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age-correlated decline in some measures of programming ability, one cannot take those results and conclude that a specific programmer's ability began to decline at 30. Also, AFAIR the studies don't agree on a specific age and report increasing variance which makes it even less reasonable to make the conclusion the author made.