I, Andrew Jones-Gonzales, 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 initial run-ins with Lisp were all done on GNU CLisp and SBCL. Although I had started to learn the language in late 2005 or early 2006, it had taken me a while to actually get into it; I had a strong dislike for GNU Emacs. However, once I realized that I could use SLIME and Emacs to take advantage of Lisp's way of incremental compilation and programming (and learned Emacs properly), I was hooked and couldn't wait to find projects to use it in. This switch occurred around June or July of 2007. As a side effect, it also turned me into an Emacs fan.
What led you to try Lisp?
Mostly, it was all the praise I had read about the language. The very first time I encountered the language, I was horrified by its look and quickly wrote it off. Once I forced myself to have an open mind, and accept the parenthesis, I knew I had finally found what I was unknowingly looking for.
What other languages have you been using most?
Lots of C#, mostly under Linux. Also some C and C++.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I'm to the point where I can write some practical command-line driven programs. GUI programming still baffles me, and I haven't taken a poke at networking yet with Lisp.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Lisp is the only language I know of that can actually inspire deep philosophical thinking in a person simply by them tinkering in it.
