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On the #Emacs subreddit someone asked: "What exactly is the advantage of having a LISP machine at my fingertips?". I gave an example, which I reproduce here:

One time I organized a conference session. I had to select among submitted talks and schedule them. The conference had a website I could log into to see all the submitted abstracts, so I wrote some elisp code to download all the abstracts and create a nicely formatted #OrgMode file with all the information —Emacs comes with functions to make HTTP requests and with a full HTML parser!

Once I chose the talks to accept (which I tagged in the Org mode file), I wrote a quick bit of elisp to write emails to all the talk applicants notifying them of their acceptance or rejection. This code used Org's parsing functions to go through the talks, get the applicant information and to pick either the acceptance or rejection template as appropriate. The code didn't actually send the emails, it just created and pre-populated message-mode buffers so I could review and customize the messages before sending.

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