> The language that you build your extensions on shouldn't be thought of as a programming language in afterthought; it should be designed as a programming language. In fact, we discovered that the best programming language for that purpose was Lisp.
> It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). 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.
> (2) Bernie Greenberg says that Dan Weinreb's implementation of Emacs for the Lisp Machine came before Greenberg's implementation for Multics. I apologize for the mistake.
> The language that you build your extensions on shouldn't be thought of as a programming language in afterthought; it should be designed as a programming language. In fact, we discovered that the best programming language for that purpose was Lisp.
> It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). 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.
> (2) Bernie Greenberg says that Dan Weinreb's implementation of Emacs for the Lisp Machine came before Greenberg's implementation for Multics. I apologize for the mistake.
~ "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs" (Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference). https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20374467