Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to discredit Blender but FYI, Maya has been a programmable environment since it came out. Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's i…
I suppose they both owe their inspiration to AutoCAD, which has been using AutoLISP well since the 80s.
I don't know autocad well. What distinguished Maya is that the app is made from scripts. There's lots of apps that have a scripting language but usually it's tacked on for user scripting. It's not there to implement the actual app. Example 3DSMax you can turn off the scripting it will still run just fine. Maya doesn't function without scripts. It IS scripts.