"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."

That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so then they don't do anything with them but a strict subset they've decided they understand and wind up doing all sorts of things wrong or inefficiently. Often, in trying to protect the computer and themselves from what they've convinced themselves they don't understand, they wind up breaking it instead: they don't know what they're doing because they think they can't learn. "It's too complicated."