alt Hacker NewsNobody knows how Stallman, or anyone else, works either. But folks don’t need to understand how he works to understand, say, EMacs.
Folks can take EMacs as is and decipher it in isolation of Stallman, or any of the other authors.
But even then, how many people understand the internals of EMacs, or the interrelationships of the zillion lines of code in hundreds of files? Yet, millions of ignorant people leverage and apply EMacs to their daily tasks.
Look at what the REA impact is having on all sorts of code bases. The ONE THING that pushed Stallman over the edge and onto his path. The lack of source code to a print driver (or something along those lines).
Well, it’s all Open Source now.
Not only is the source “open”. It can be explained.
“Here is the source tree to EMacs. ELI5 the garbage collector.” “Working…”
It goes both ways. Now everyone has access to a savant to explain software, if that’s what they like.
A savant who confabulates about 10 % of the time, per the best benchmarks, no matter how much “thinking” it does (GPT-based LLMs will always “hallucinate”)? How do you trust it?
I would rather take the time to ask the same question to the Emacs contributors mailing-list, who have the incentive to check their posts for mistakes.