It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else, which includes sound and/or pragmatic technological decisions.
I'm not fond of esr in general but he's spot on with this post.
> It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else
To be fair to RMS he has tried to consider opposing views in the past when he can see and understand the need behind the proposition.
In this case the problem is that RMS doesn't know enough C++/Java/C#-style OO programming, and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search and replace should be sufficient.
And because he doesn't see the need himself, he wont consider it a valid use-case which GNU/GCC/Emacs needs to support.
This already has lead to chilling effects: People have stopped working on adding GCC-based support for auto-completion and similar functionality. RMS may be stubborn, but he's not stupid: He sees adding the proposed LLDB/LLVM-based functionality as a direct consequence of this, and bypassing his "authoriity" on the GCC-issue and thus an "attack" on GCC and the goals of GNU/FCC itself.
In my mind, he is obviously right that people are side-stepping his judgement, but he is wrong that this is an attack on free software: People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously fighting them to make it not happen.
And now we have RMS fighting to artificially limit free software, in his mind to preserve it. I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... A decade?
To me forking core GNU projects to leave RMS out just in order to get things done is increasingly looking like the only option.
>and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools
>to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search
>and replace should be sufficient.
Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ?
From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.
The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang.
Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.
I believe the explanation here is that the FSF/GNU is willing to support their tools on non-free OSes as long as those tools work the same as the do on free OSes, and in particular, don't work "better" as compared to the free version because the non-free OS provides additional services somehow.
They don't want their tools to be superior or have better functionality on a non-free OS.
For example, emacs wouldn't take a patch that hooked into speech recognition provided by the OS, unless that was also available on a free OS. And say Microsoft or Apple provided powerful functionality for debuggers via a system api (and this same functionality isn't on a free OS) - gdb would not take a patch that used it.
Yes, this is a perfect example of the difference between open source and free software.
I remember Stallman saying something along the lines of "even if it weren't as good as proprietary software, it would be important for people to use free software" over a decade ago.
The fact that releasing the source code, and allowing people to modify it, leads to high quality software is a nice perk as far as he's concerned; but it's not the reason for the FSF. The FSF exists so that programmers aren't helpless when their system breaks.
Raymond's arguments, on the other hand are all about which compiler or debugger is better, assuming the compilers and debuggers being compared are open source.
Note this is explicitly RMS' philosophy, which hasn't changed. For him, freedom takes precedence over technological quality. He has been saying this for ages, for example when he explained that Open Source (as represented by Eric Raymond) and Free Software (as represented by the FSF) have very different goals.
If you accept that RMS' worldview is about freedom, even if it sometimes means sacrificing some technological advantages, you'll see his position is consistent and reasonable.
The problem is that the number of users is directly proportional to technological quality.
People use gcc over non-copyleft compilers because they perceive it as technically superior. People use emacs over non-copyleft editors because they perceive it as technically superior.
Sacrificing technological quality to fulfill an agenda will actually have the opposite effect, because it'll drive users to non-copyleft solutions in order to get the better piece of software.
It's not just the number of users, either. When your software is dominant, you're in control. You get to have a say in the direction of the technology, and you get to prevent the lesser players from having their say.
By sacrificing technological quality for ideological purity, RMS is giving up both his userbase and his dominant position he can use to prevent non-free software from taking over.
> it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else
Exactly. I respect RMS, and his position that proprietary software is immoral, but I also know that position won't be shared by many (maybe even most) of the people who care about free software.
I'm not fond of esr in general but he's spot on with this post.