[gavinpc]

If you're happy, keep on truckin'.

But to answer your question. This has been said a million times, but here's another angle. In a recent talk, Rich Hickey was talking about the design of electronic music modules:

> In other words, there's a human interface and a machine interface to the same > things. And the machine interfaces were there all the time — in fact, they were > first. And then the human interfaces come. We have to remember that as a > design thing. What's wrong with SQL? What's wrong with SQL is there's no > machine interface to SQL. They only designed a human interface to SQL, and > we've suffered ever since, cause we have to send these strings around. You can > always build a human interface on top of a machine interface, but the other is > often disgusting.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor... (at about 41:00)

Emacs is built on a machine interface first (elisp). Even the mouse actions in emacs are processed with elisp. So the human interface is not hard-wired. That's why hackers like it.