He is extremely rigid. The strangest things here to me are RMS's allergy to data abstraction (insisting on using bare Lisp objects for things like events) and

He is extremely rigid. The strangest things here to me are RMS's allergy to data abstraction (insisting on using bare Lisp objects for things like events) and his excessive parsimony in design (unifying keymaps and menubars, when the only thing they have in common is that they're both trees). Neither of these reflects the software engineering practices that were taught to most of us at MIT. Perhaps he picked it up from hanging around some of the older hackers who were used to working with extremely limited machine resources. Certainly in its early days, GNU Emacs was criticized for excessive resource consumption by people who were trying to run it on relatively small machines ("Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" was one joke I recall). Perhaps RMS was influenced by these criticisms; and probably, the Lucid developers did not feel quite so constrained, given their market. In any case, it's been a very long time since 8MB was a lot. It's funny to me now, when I occasionally use one of the fancy IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, to see how XEmacs is now the lightweight, fast choice by comparison. (And it loads in a 500MB log file in a couple of seconds -- try that with your IDE.)