I, Albert Krewinkel, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
My first serious contact with lisp was Common Lisp in 2006.

What led you to try Lisp?
My first contact with lisp was in 2004, two years after I started programing by learning PHP. I couldn't find any reason why that strange parens language might be usefull (except as a target for jokes). So I learned Perl, Python, Java, R, and a little C - i.e. most things that seemed to be valueable in the toolbox of a biologist. In 2006 I was looking for some toolkits for image processing. What I found was lush. It looked promising, so just out of interest I looked up Lisp in wikipedia. I followed, some links, read some stuff by Paul Graham, remembered the words in Eric Raymonds essay, and... well, you know the rest.

What other languages have you been using most?
Most of the time I was using Python. It was the first non domain specific language I learned and therefore the one I knew best.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Lisp is about to supersede Python as the language I know best. That doesn't mean I'm good at programing in it, but at least I'm getting familiar with the lisp way of doing things.

What do you think of Lisp so far?
To do things in lisp seems to me somewhat like my first experiments with chemicals. It brings back the same childlike joy. With the single difference, that it's a lot more productive writing lisp code than making stink bombs.

RtL Paul Graham | RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Eric Raymond | Switch Date 2006