Would Stallman have been on par with a SWE at a first rate tech company (Facebook, Google, etc)?

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No, he was at no point considered an elite coder. Mind you, standards were quite different in the last century when space-time efficiency really mattered. Gates was renowned for keeping things tight (let's dispense with the Epstein jokes). Computer science wasn't a thing in those days. He was a more of math guy, and one has to figure CSAIL was hard-up for math guys with *any* computing experience (computation is sort of looked down upon, even to this day). Legend has it he was a Math 55 student which I find hard to believe, although it's possible 55 wasn't quite the beast it is today.

Stallman practically single handedly rewrote the unix operating system from scratch and gave it away. He is perfectly justified in claiming that Linux should be called GNU Linux. He wrote emacs, elisp, gcc and make. I don't think anyone that has ever worked for Google or Facebook can say their code has had even close to the same impact as Stallman's work. Their work was all built on his.

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This has been removed, as posts must relate to emacs.

What were the elite programmers working on in his day? What does "elite programmer" even mean?

Most of them have not even never been aware of this, so when they heard the argumentation about the name, they believe RMS is trying to steal credits from Torvalds.