RMS has an interesting anecdote about this in his speech on Emacs: "[Bernie Greenberg] wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands i

RMS has an interesting anecdote about this in his speech on Emacs: "[Bernie Greenberg] 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." http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html