Pure Storage, where I work, has been hosting a Bay Area Emacs meet up (two of them so far). Normally, the way these things are, I pretty much expect everyone to have some software engineering background; that’s usually the only reason to want that much power in what most people consider a “mere text editor”.
So I was really surprised (in a pleasant way!) to encounter a departure from the norm. In the last meetup, the main presentation was by someone who wasn’t a software engineer, and was actually a … monk!
Emacs being emacs, this was about a sort of super-charged org-mode++ type system he had built within Emacs, patterned after the Building a second brain (which I hadn't heard of before his talk, but makes a lot of sense now) idea. It turns out he had a friend in a computer science program who introduced him to Emacs (and, incidentally, Clojure!)
You can see some of the slides and more details about this system here, but I was more interested in the non-programming part and the speaker’s background. There were some very (I felt) insightful comments about the interplay of wisdom, love and power, and how these are expressed in Emacs (!) It was just a very, very, very … surreal meetup.