1, 2, n - How Coding Is About Design Iteration

I'm a little troubled with: "[a]nd it's not with a text-editor." I'm all for evolution but essentially you deal with text. So no matter how much you augment that you still deal with text (unless you propose a completely pictorial system which he doesn't appear to do). So in essence you still use, at the base, a text-editor.

He calls Emacs a glorified text-editor - and he's right, but the glorified part, or the extensible part, is exactly what he should look at. SLIME mode makes a good start, but one could do much more if they were motivated like one may expect he is.

I also fail to understand: "...so terrible that you have to re-write it. Because basically, you didn't iterate your design." If he's arguing that we should always rethink our design after a while and not continue on regardless I agree. But I'm not completely sure what he's getting at. Thoughts?