When did you first try Lisp (meaning here and throughout the survey "any member of the Lisp family") seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
About two years ago. I looked (and am still looking) at Common Lisp and Scheme
Switch Date 2001
What led you to try Lisp?
I read Paul Graham's two books - "ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp" and agreed that there was something really wonderful and better here.
RtL Paul Graham
If you were trying Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, what was that other language and what did you not like about it, or what were you hoping to find different in Lisp?
I have used many languages over many years. Up until about two years ago I have heavily used C, C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript, SQLWindows, ... The big problem for me is productivity. I spend far too much time writing uninteresting code, and do not have enough support for the tough problems.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)
I think I understand the languages Common Lisp/CLOS and Scheme quite well now. I have written some interesting applications to *help with* production code. I have not been able to write any production code.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
As a language - THE BEST! (And I have looked far afield -- ML and friends, Haskell and friends, Prolog, Mozart, Python, Rebol, and many Smalltalks). The problem lies in the "vendors" and a match to my world. I create "business" apps in the MS Windows world -- heavy relational database, sophisticated GUI (both thick client and browser), Web Services (SOAP/XML), interop with COM (Message Queueing, E-Mail, XML, ...).
Franz has a pretty complete solution, probably production capable, but it is outrageously expensive to tool up and then deploy.
Xanalys has a less complete solution. CLIM is pretty primitive by today's UI standards. There is fragmentary support for Web Services and interop with COM.
Others (CLISP, Coreman, ...) are even less complete - especially for UI, Database, Web Services and other interop.
PLT Scheme is about the most complete of the Schemes, but UI is still very difficult, and support is "academic, best effort as long as no exams going on ..." or (quite good actually) mailing list.
Other Schemes (ChezScheme, Bigloo, MIT, SISC, Kawa, ...) have insufficient support for Windows GUI, Databases, Web Services, other interop.