> It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else
To be fair to RMS he has tried to consider opposing views in the past when he can see and understand the need behind the proposition.
In this case the problem is that RMS doesn't know enough C++/Java/C#-style OO programming, and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search and replace should be sufficient.
And because he doesn't see the need himself, he wont consider it a valid use-case which GNU/GCC/Emacs needs to support.
This already has lead to chilling effects: People have stopped working on adding GCC-based support for auto-completion and similar functionality. RMS may be stubborn, but he's not stupid: He sees adding the proposed LLDB/LLVM-based functionality as a direct consequence of this, and bypassing his "authoriity" on the GCC-issue and thus an "attack" on GCC and the goals of GNU/FCC itself.
In my mind, he is obviously right that people are side-stepping his judgement, but he is wrong that this is an attack on free software: People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously fighting them to make it not happen.
And now we have RMS fighting to artificially limit free software, in his mind to preserve it. I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... A decade?
To me forking core GNU projects to leave RMS out just in order to get things done is increasingly looking like the only option.