Brian Palmer [1][BROKEN LINK] is a graduate student who hangs out (as bpalmer) quite regularly on #emacs, #xemacs, and similar channels. Overly opinionated, with too much time on his hands, it’s a miracle that everybody hasn’t ignored him.
Recently he has decided to try to cut back some on irc, in order to focus those opinions into more permanent form.
ELisp is a remarkable kludge of a semi-elegant language pasted to a very baroque structure. Its event model and architecture are fundamentally intertwined with the editor, so I think some people more accustomed to programming “traditional” languages overlook the best way to do things in elisp. Perhaps the best solution to this would be to build a catalog of ELisp Design Patterns.