EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.

No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.