Why Emacs?

Emacs is a text editor built on top of a Lisp (Elisp) interpreter. The full API of the both text editor and the Lisp interpreter itself is available to the user.
For this reason, along with the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of useful additions available to Emacs, I am learning it.
There isn’t anything more to it than that!

Emacs influence on Ruby

Who would’ve thought that Ruby’s block ‘end’ keyword was created to facilitate Emacs? Oh man!

When [Matz] was first starting out writing Ruby, he was coding the Emacs ruby-mode.el for it at the same time. He expressed some frustration with modes for other languages like Python and Pascal in which the editor could not look at a line of code and figure out where it should be indented to, so he resolved that Ruby as a language should not fall into that particular trap. With that in mind he chose the end keyword as a block delimiter so that it would be easier to write an Emacs mode for.