The introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp was my first contact with Lisp. And the reason I took it up - the excuse I used to cover up my insatiable curiosity - was that I was writing my diary using emacs, and since emacs was all about customization, it should be possible to create a keyboard shortcut to insert the current date and time of day.
And down the rabbit hole I went. So, in a way, Bob Chassell contributed to me becoming a programmer.
Oh wow. I've been out of touch with Bob for decades. For a little while there we were both active in the Loglan community (this was before Lojban). I remember once riding my bike from Belmont, MA to meet Bob at some little airfield, where we tossed the bike in the back of his two-seater Cessna and took off for a Loglan meeting somewhere north of there (New Hampshire?).
His theft analogy seems to apply better to the LGPL and MPL than the GPL. The LGPL and MPL make sure that your work stays free. The GPL forces work that uses yours (in certain ways) to be held under the same standard, regardless of how it treats your work.
You can buy it here for $25 from the FSF: https://shop.fsf.org/books/signed-introduction-programming-e...
This has been a valuable resource on my own road toward learning elisp, and I'm very grateful he wrote it and made it freely available.