Aucbvax.2131
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!dlw@MIT-AI
Mon Jul 6 03:50:11 1981
Re: Tools for personal workstations
From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW AT MIT-AI>
Actually, quite a few users of Multics Emacs (in particular)
do learn to write extensions. Multics Emacs has an extension
language that is particularly easy to learn and start using,
and it is well-documented. Secretaries do this as well as
computer programmers (secretaries are often underrated; there
is a wide range of people doing secretarial things out there,
and some of them are pretty damned smart people). You'd be
surprised.
However, there will always be a lot of users who don't want
to learn to "program". I think the key to making programming
painless is to use programming-by-example systems. Emacs
keyboard macros are a start in this direction, although they
are too simple-minded to do the job adequately at all. Dan
Halbert's Master's degree work at U. C. Berkeley is a
particularly good example of a prototype of such a system.
I hope more people work on this in the future.
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