GNU Emacs raison d'etre - 1981-ish version

[Eduardo Ochs]

Hi list,

this is so different from the raisons d'être for Emacs that are being
discussed in the other thread that I felt that it would be better to
create a new thread to discuss it...

This is a section from rms's "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable
Display Editor", published in 1981 -
<https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC29>:


  The programmable editor is an outstanding opportunity to learn to
  program! A beginner can see the effect of his simple program on the
  text he is editing; this feedback is fast and in an easily
  understood form. Educators have found display programming to be very
  suited for children experimenting with programming, for just this
  reason (see LOGO).

  Programming editor commands has the additional advantage that a
  program need not be very large to be tangibly useful in editing. A
  first project can be very simple. One can thus slide very smoothly
  from using the editor to edit into learning to program with it.

  When large numbers of nontechnical workers are using a programmable
  editor, they will he tempted constantly to begin programming in the
  course of their day-to-day lives. This should contribute greatly to
  computer literacy, especially because many of the people thus
  exposed will be secretaries taught by society that they are
  incapable of doing mathematics, and unable to imagine for a moment
  that they can learn to program. But that won't stop them from
  learning it if they don't know that it is programming that they are
  learning! According to Bernard Greenberg, this is already happening
  with Multics EMACS.


Emacs lets people with very little experience in programming write
useful programs that are just one or two lines long - and this turns
non-programmers into programmers magically, sometimes without them
noticing. In many cases new users start writing one-liners in Lisp in
their first days using Emacs - so for them it takes just a few days to
be magically transformed into a programmer.

This is very different from having to invest time in energy in Emacs
during years to be adequately rewarded.

Disclaimer: I am ***EXTREMELY*** biased. I just grepped my notes in
http://angg.twu.net/e/ and found more than 50000 elisp one-liners in
that directory only - and for me the main raison d'être of Emacs is
C-x C-e... so these are my biased two cents. =/


  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html
    http://angg.twu.net/emacs.html