The GNU people are absolutely obsessed with correctness and performance. It's kind of annoying actually. I assume it has something to do with RMS' ties to MIT and Lisp machines (an example of staggering complexity), see Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay.
I tend to fall in the NJ school myself, though I do think Emacs is something special. And though it's derided as slow, Emacs has a ton of super crazy optimizations, especially around rendering.
Pretty much every GNU project written in C is totally unreadable and hopelessly baroque: gcc, glibc, coreutils, etc. For fun, compare some OpenBSD Unix utility implementations with their GNU counterparts. The OpenBSD tools' source code is a joy to read and represents the pinnacle of elegant C. The GNU versions are ugly as sin, but functionally superior in pretty much every way. I don't really agree with how they write code, but you got to respect the almost OCD attention to detail: no edge case goes unhandled.
World's apart from the terse and cavalier style of traditional Unix hackers.
I tend to fall in the NJ school myself, though I do think Emacs is something special. And though it's derided as slow, Emacs has a ton of super crazy optimizations, especially around rendering.
Pretty much every GNU project written in C is totally unreadable and hopelessly baroque: gcc, glibc, coreutils, etc. For fun, compare some OpenBSD Unix utility implementations with their GNU counterparts. The OpenBSD tools' source code is a joy to read and represents the pinnacle of elegant C. The GNU versions are ugly as sin, but functionally superior in pretty much every way. I don't really agree with how they write code, but you got to respect the almost OCD attention to detail: no edge case goes unhandled.
World's apart from the terse and cavalier style of traditional Unix hackers.