Why do people think that Emacs is impossible for non-programmers to use? "He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp

Why do people think that Emacs is impossible for non-programmers to use? "He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html "I'm a non-technical user, non-programmer, and I started using it because of org-mode." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/KRtRHBwW1lYJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K... "Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it. People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them." http://tess.oconnor.cx/2006/03/quality-without-a-name http://tess.oconnor.cx/2006/03/quality-without-a-name