I generally agree with the sentiment that writing programs, which are supposed to be advanced technology, is done with tools that are often woefully bad and see

I generally agree with the sentiment that writing programs, which are supposed to be advanced technology, is done with tools that are often woefully bad and seem stuck in a long past decade, but be wary of generalizing about "you" so much. I use emacs because I find I'm the most productive with emacs, and because it's the best environment for Common Lisp development, but I'm aware of its warts and will happily criticise them at length -- even when talking to vim users! Not everyone who uses emacs is as breathless about it as the author of the article. I do think your jab at emacs lisp is spot on -- it's really not the lisp you want, and Common Lisp is certainly good enough these days to have a stab at writing an emacs clone in it. I don't know enough about Scheme to comment about it though. My favourite candidate for most decrepit CS tool is GDB -- it astounds me that this is still the best the open source / Unix world can produce in the field of debuggers, especially since debuggers are the sort of non-user-facing, lots-of-interesting-technical-problems type of area that open source usually excels at. Every time it repeatedly segfaults and kills my carefully constructed debugging state I just want to cry.