[aaronem]

I tend to suspect it's partly Lisp syntax but mostly that the entire environment was far enough removed from what people, including the mentioned secretaries, thought of as "programming", that it didn't register with them that that was what they were doing.

You can see the same thing today with stuff like VBA macros in Excel. I've seen some amazingly complex business logic implemented that way by people who absolutely did not think of themselves as programmers, and indeed tended to respond with bafflement to the suggestion that what they'd done could be described as programming.