I felt an unusual surge of profanity upon reading this article.

I mean, how on Earth can anyone spend more then three decades developing and maintaining a bloody TEXT EDITOR ?!!
Frankly, the more I think about it, the more I feel that anyone spewing nonsense about Emacs and how "superior" it is is nothing more than a Macaddict with the wrong obsession.

32 years. For Heaven's sake, what a waste of time.

24 Man years = 34 Dork years. Mans live longer than Dorks does.

Its almost right if you think of the 32 as being an octal number. (Octal was very popular back in the days -- everyone was running their 'ixes' on DEC hardware or something similar.)(I hated it, BTW. Always been a hex man myself.)

While GNU Emacs was started in 1984, RMS made a 'prototype' eight years earlier, in 1976, that's the reason for the apparent discrepancy. The first 'emacs' was a set of macros for TECO, a popular programmers' editor back then.

How can somebody spend 34 years on a project started in 1984? Does he have FOSS TARDIS too?

2008 - 1984 = 24 years. Where's the 32 years coming from?