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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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