> And yet, the referenced discussion breaks down into RMS on one side and people who want to make gcc work better for themselves on the other.
At the risk of someone building a closed backend off an artifact of the GCC frontend; at the risk of someone profiting off RMS' work without following his conditions for making that work free.
It's important to remember that he isn't against Emacs getting the information it needs to do its work. In fact, this mirrors a common discussion in computer security, and system administration in general: you give applications and users only the permission they need, to protect against bad actors. If Emacs doesn't need the full AST, why would you give it to them?
>If Emacs doesn't need the full AST, why would you give it to them?
Because the range of ways people might want to process code is vast. It's impossible to predict in advance what all those possibilities might be. The only way to allow the full range of transformations is to provide the full AST. Denying people the ability to manipulate code using code is to deny them a very important and powerful tool in computing. It reminds me a lot of when Apple tried to restrict what languages people could use when developing for iOS.
Emacs does need the full AST. The whole point of Emacs is to allow users to write applications that were UNANTICIPATED by its developers. You can't predict exactly what sort of information users will need, so you can't make some "safe" amount of information available.
It's mind boggling that this even needs to be explained. I get the sense that rms doesn't really grok the Emacs philosophy anymore.
Urk! You might well be right, I've been assuming he doesn't grok C++, which he doesn't use.
This would be terrible, for as far as I'm concerned, his single greatest contribution to computing is the EMACS philosophy that he developed out of a primitive set of TECO macros. (I believe everything else would have happened more or less, e.g. without Linux, BSD would be ruling now after a 2 year pause for that AT&T lawsuit.)
You're certainly free to keep typing this stuff however the irony is that we all understand RMS clear, consistent position on the matter. The issue is that, by his own admission, he doesn't understand the other side.
> we all understand RMS clear, consistent position on the matter.
Then why are "we" all still using his software (which was given a license to match his philosophy) and complaining when he maintains his "clear, consistant position on the matter" and refuses to compromise his beliefs.
To use a poor analogy, it's like going to church and complaining when they talk about God.
There are lots of other options out there for editors, compilers, and OSes. If "we" really do understand his position, and disagree with it to the point that "we" want to make changes incompatible with his position, "our" time and energy would be better served working with an OS and software which better matches "our" ideology (like FreeBSD; awesome software under the BSD license).
> The issue is that, by his own admission, he doesn't understand the other side.
That seems like his problem, not ours. And he's not making it our problem; we're making it our problem by trying to use FSF software in a way other than what they intended.
EDIT: Scare quotes around We and Our are used because I, personally, agree with RMS. I didn't used to, but over the years I have grown to appreciate the GPL, the FSF, and the openness these extreme ideologies have brought about for us.
RMS popularity among newer programmers is always low (for the exact reasons outlined here, his software isn't "free" enough), and yet I find that after years of experience, we begin to appreciate that without his staunch support, we would be developing software in a very different world.
A world which we have a taste of now, in the Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook walled gardens: I don't know how Swift works. I can't fix bugs in Swift's implementation, and I can't build upon Swift for the betterment of all, should I so desire.
The fundamental issue is that for RMS (and perhaps you?), using software is like going to church and accepting the the moral code of whomever produced that software. However, for most people, that is not the case whatsoever. My baker can have all sorts of moral codes that I don't endorse when I eat his bread.
I don't support the FSF, I do support access to source code, and the freedom to extend the source code. Sometimes the FSF supports our shared goal, sometimes the FSF sees it other ways than I do, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to stop using emacs because I disagree with poor management of GCC.
The world is big enough for a plurality of ideologies.
Responding to your edit: >RMS popularity among newer programmers is always low (for the exact reasons outlined here, his software isn't "free" enough), and yet I find that after years of experience, we begin to appreciate that without his staunch support, we would be developing software in a very different world.
I find this to be an exceptionally unconvincing argument, because my experience has always been exactly the reverse. Newer programmers get excited about having access to source code, and they see RMS as the one saying the most about it, and just assume that RMS is responsible. After a while, they learn about the history of BSD and open source and realize that shared access to source code is a very natural way for software projects to develop. Without RMS being a frontman, we'd still the BSDs, we'd probably still have Linux. We'd have needed a compiler like GCC, but that void would probably have been filled sooner than Clang did it.
Bringing up food and morality might be a bad pick if you are arguing that people do not care. Ecological food, humanly treated animals for meat and eggs, and fair trade, is all concepts which carries large market shares and is believed by many people to be superior moral choices.
Using products like those does not mean you have to accept or endorse the the moral code that the products represent. However, for most people, morality do play a part of why they pick those products.
Perhaps a better (yet still poor) analogy would be going into an Islam Mosque and telling them to install some crosses.
Or complaining that your baker won't make bagels because he's doesn't approve of using lye on human consumables.
> The fundamental issue is that for RMS (and perhaps you?), using software is like going to church and accepting the the moral code of whomever produced that software
RMS and the FSF are pretty lenient in this case (there are licenses which literally wrap the use of the software in a moral code); you have no need to accept his moral code when you use the software. His licensing (and moral code) only matter when you want to change the code and distribute those changes.
Fortunately for all of us, there are plenty of licenses, and plenty of tools which use licenses which better match the "free with no restrictions whatsoever" point of view.
Imagine RMS's argument if the developers of a proprietary software asked "well, which part exactly of our software would you like to alter? We'll study how to give you restricted access to those."
At the risk of someone building a closed backend off an artifact of the GCC frontend; at the risk of someone profiting off RMS' work without following his conditions for making that work free.
It's important to remember that he isn't against Emacs getting the information it needs to do its work. In fact, this mirrors a common discussion in computer security, and system administration in general: you give applications and users only the permission they need, to protect against bad actors. If Emacs doesn't need the full AST, why would you give it to them?