Steve Yegge told this story:

> 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.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

Ever since reading that essay years ago I’ve been perennially curious about Mailman. Would be really cool to see a screencast or even just some screenshots of what the UX was like.

That's from Richard Stallman. “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

Its from RMS, not Steve Yegge: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

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.

Tech people have a problem with assuming that everyone is an idiot, mostly because it’s easier to do half-assed work aimed at a moron.

Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by people who actually spoke to the users.

The thing that has irritated me often is not that people are idiots but they often lack of self belief that they could learn to do something. The key here is the secretaries didn’t realise they were learning to code, but if you told them to learn to code they would most likely make excuses.

Of course.

You pay your admin $18/hr and pay a programmer $50. People tend to assume their place.

We bought a new iSeries mainly because the accounting staff said, point blank, the GUI on the replacement system was total crap. The green screen is efficient and they can get everything done quickly without moving a hand off the keyboard.

Exactly. Go to any retailer with these green screen Point of Sale systems and watch them wiz around the keyboard.

Millions of people used WP5, with its cryptic codes and huge keyboard overlays. I don’t believe that’s any easier than Emacs (or HTML). People can figure things out, when they have to.

Cryptic, yes, but discoverable! Recently I was trying to help someone fix their bizarrely broken Word document, and I would have given my right arm for "F5 Reveal Codes."

Emacs is quite discoverable, too. Spacemacs even more, I think.

Yup. It's called a "self-documenting editor" for a reason :). From built-in help on every command, function, variable and keybinding, through apropos and tutorial, through a full-length manual - all available off-line, in the editor - it's easy to get your bearings around using and customizing Emacs. That is, once you adopt the old-school, pre-web notion of software actually having documentation.

It's right there in the toolbar, the "P"-ish looking icon.

You mean the paragraph mark, "¶"? The Show All feature in Word will highlight whitespace, tabs, newlines, which is helpful. But in WordPerfect, Reveal Codes would show much more than that: style changes, image and table introductions, etc. It was much more like looking at the HTML source of a Web page in a Web Developer tool -- not only could you see the tags, but you could modify and remove them easily and precisely.

I wonder if people also get better at math if they don't notice it's math.