Rasmus wouldn't be idealistic (say compared to RMS).
I have been in contact with both over different parts of my career.
Rasmus is pragmatic. In some sense he would say "sure, go ahead and write that code" without telling you the "One PHP Way of function arguments" (yeah, look at the *sort funcs).
Actually he does worse - he will put up a patch for review that I disagree with so that I will be unable to ignore it & the only way to defend my opinion it is to fix it "properly".
That is the other extreme of being idealistic - it's being extremely pragmatic. Also being influential simply because he doesn't bother arguing on principle.
I have been in contact with both over different parts of my career.
Rasmus is pragmatic. In some sense he would say "sure, go ahead and write that code" without telling you the "One PHP Way of function arguments" (yeah, look at the *sort funcs).
Actually he does worse - he will put up a patch for review that I disagree with so that I will be unable to ignore it & the only way to defend my opinion it is to fix it "properly".
That is the other extreme of being idealistic - it's being extremely pragmatic. Also being influential simply because he doesn't bother arguing on principle.