I think you misunderstood what rms said there (but if the transcript is accurate, he was unclear). Yes, Multics Emacs was the one used by secretaries (except a

I think you misunderstood what rms said there (but if the transcript is accurate, he was unclear). Yes, Multics Emacs was the one used by secretaries (except at AI & LCS where they used TECO EMACS on ITS). In both cases most of the extending by non-programmers was done with macros (`c-X (` which is still that command today). Multics Emacs had an excellent design and you could in fact write some very simple functions with a copy-and-modify rote approach (nothing wrong with that!). But beyond that I never met one whom one could describe as knowing Lisp. In fact most would have been intimidated if you'd told them that they could improve the editor by "programming". This "programming is impossibly hard for a person like me" attitude was a bad cultural property of the 1970s, thankfully now somewhat in the past. But that change depended on direct work on the problem by people like Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon in the LOGO lab (part of the AI lab). Excel is a great (in volume and reach) example of this: many people write very complex and sophisticated programs in Excel and still don't believe they can program. Now Python is embedded in Excel some people can be tricked into writing real programs. And, presumably, tricked into running sophisticated malware!