I, Alexander Lehmann, 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 overall encounter with Lisp was about one year ago. I quickly worked my way through Paul Graham's „ANSI Common Lisp“ and implemented a few things here and there. However, the first real serious LISP programming took place only a few weeks ago.

What led you to try Lisp?
Frequent visits to programming.reddit along with a lot of talking to friends at the university raised my interest in getting to know Lisp. At first I only wanted to find out what all the „fuzz“ was about. I didn't expect, however, to make such a valuable experience as Lisp programming seems to me now.

What other languages have you been using most?
I've done a lot of programming in statically typed languages like C and foremost C++, but have also worked on projects in x86 Assembler and Java.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Hard to say... Until now I've read Paul Graham's and Peter Seibel's essays and books, many related pages on the internet and „munched“ a rather big piece of the LispWorks Hyperspec ;-)
My biggest project so far was a raytracer (yes, a 'bit' more elaborated than the one in PG's book).

What do you think of Lisp so far?
Since I consider myself quite new to Lisp this question is difficult to answer, too. What I've learned so far convinces me of Lisp in favour of many other languages. I have the impression that in Lisp it's rather easy to express exactly what I'm thinking or what I want to achieve - at least much better than in anything else. Also the code tends to be shorter, and once I got used to all the parentheses perfectly readable as well.
SLIME and Emacs are a beautiful combination. I'd only like to see Lisp a bit faster here and there (nowadays I'm using SBCL and not CLISP anymore).

Switch Date 2006

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