How Emacs changed my life

1. The document describes how the author's experience with Emacs as a student taught him about software freedom and how to read and modify source code. This led him to create his own Emacs-based tools and influenced the design of Ruby. 2. Emacs taught the author the power of Lisp and how to implement a programming language and garbage collection. Using Emacs to write code, documents and email made him a more effective programmer. 3. Emacs had a profound influence on the author and changed his life by helping him become a hacker and free software advocate.