I admire Stallman's unworldly, unfettered commitment to his principles. It's difficult to live an ethical life, and twice as difficult to live an ethical life under capitalism. Stallman's manic devotion to assiduously following his own moral compass is, bizarre though its manifestation may be, something we should all aspire towards.<p>That being said, I'm perpetually frustrated by the boneheadedness of his ethical commitments. They strike me as ineffective and, more critically, unsound: it seems to me like Stallman ad-hoc transformed an (absolutely justified) distaste for closed-source software into a system of ethics by, fundamentally, adopting aphorisms as axioms. Whether this was done as a post-hoc justification for his depth of passion in this area, or whether it was just a gradual metastasis, I don't know.
> The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages.<p>Then:<p>> My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. As a result, I have not had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby.
While I don't agree with his stance on a number of things, I find the consistency and unapologetic nature of posts such as these refreshing. <i>This is the thing I believe. You don't have to, but here's why I think it's wrong not to.</i><p>A case can be made that they're too set in stone, with no flexibility - but isn't that what makes them principles? They are <i>core beliefs</i> and in absence of fundamentally view-altering events, they seldom see changes after we reach maturity. IMO if you find yourself rationalizing your way around your own principles, then what you have are a set of things you'd like to believe about yourself - which is quite a different thing.<p>For as many years as RMS has been in the public eye, I've never seen him rationalize away his principles for the sake of convenience. Agree with him or not, that's a rare thing and I can't help but respect it.
Dear HN - at what point does the proclivity towards a philosophy transition to insanity? Is it when an FSF zealot refuses medical treatment demanding the source code of the firmware used in his life-saving medical device? Is it when he refuses to use the roads paved by <i>insert paving device here</i> running closed source software?
> I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundamentally similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. `read', `eval', and `print' are all missing in Python.<p>Maybe I'm getting lost in the semantics but doesn't Python have a REPL a la the interpreter?
> A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix streaming was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever.<p>RMS is a very principled man, but I think he may have misunderstood "Netflix and chill".
> An explanation of the concept of designing a "user experience" which also shows why I find it loathesome. This is why I want stallman.org to remain simple: not a "user experience" but rather a place where I present certain information, views and action opportunities to you.<p>A lot of what user experience has become is trying to induce users to do what you want them to rather than "how do I make it easy for the user to do what they want." That, along with a tendency towards what I perceive as "over-design," makes this viewpoint refreshing.
> After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my keyboard. I switched to a keyboard with lighter key pressure and the problem mostly went away.<p>My experience as well. I'd been using Apple's keyboards for years, and was experiencing hand pain. I switched to a nice mechanical keyboard that activates with a click part way down so I don't need to bottom out the keys. The hand pain went away and I can't stand typing on those "chiclet style" keyboards now.
I admire Stallman. I think he's crazy, or at least a little weird, but I can respect him: he's extremely talented, he has his principles, and dammit, he sticks to them.<p>It's like Randall puts it: This is a man who believes in something.
A good programmer is measured by the programs that he does. Sometimes you can win the day by programming in visual basic, if works and its efficient then why not?.
"A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix streaming was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever."<p>When you refuse netflix and chill due to ideological conflicts with the key distribution model, just stallman things
I'm often amazed at what we've done with programming languages. They're perfect examples of accurately and concisely communicate information in a small space
I'd like to live my life with strict principles like that. Non-aggression principle style. Unfortunately, other statists don't let me.
There is one other small thing too, I like Microsoft products.
It's weird that he devotes all of this time to not being tracked online and then shares this one bit of info:<p>> "I have a Twitter account called rmspostcomments, which I use to log in on other sites to post comments on articles."