When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
Just before 2000, I got my first project after a long unemployment period. I restricted myself to only legal software which meant "free as in beer" for me at that time. Goal was to typeset a harmony theory book, which no other person in target publishing house could do because of peculiar marks everywhere in the book. I decided to use lilypond + emacs for that. I believe now that in the process, I have grown by order of magnitude, but I discovered very fast a necessity to familiarize myself with Scheme. Scheme is used as an extension language in lilypond, and is immensely usefull to tweak internals at *runtime*. I failed at that. I also failed to learn TeX (which is output of lilypond). I also failed the project. As usually happens in real life, that led me into the position of chief TeX hacker in that publishing house :)

What led you to try Lisp?
Well, typesetting is hard. Math typesetting is even harder. Typesetting in TeX and keeping interlinage equal throughout the book is a nightmare. Salaries were small in Russia at the time, deadlines were slim. I worked under pressure and needed every bit of help. So I used Emacs, AucTeX and Perl. But this was not enough - I was in need of real-time previews etc etc, so I decided to learn elisp. I already knew C++ and some other languages, but Elisp impressed me a lot. I wrote a large chunks of code in it - which I used daily. But then I had the global namespace pollution - too much functions etc.

Then I saw on website of Boris Tobotras (he runs a very useful russian resource on TeX) positive remarks on Common Lisp as his favorite language. So I made some research - and found ACL. I even wrote them a letter asking for price tag. The answer made me forget about Common lisp for half a year :) But then I started to evaluate SBCL in attempt to rewrite software which prepares texts from authors for TeX publishing (lots of regexping + user interface) in Common Lisp + gtk+. I finally did - and about half a year after, got a programming position in Common Lisp. Now this was a paradise for two years, but today I feel kinda more greedy.

What other languages have you been using most?
Perl and C.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Well, I can do what I want - and this is the main answer. I am wild. I have studied Common Lisp via reading ANSI standard in raw draft form. But due to selective listening or smth, there is still need to return back at times. I also consult AMOP (book) from time to time.

What do you think of Lisp so far?
Rare example of best approximation to common sense of perfection. Most impressive feature for me is higher-order functions and ability to store functions in variables. I now even maybe abuse that - I use this for error handling and for lazy queues, everywhere. They give ability to stick closer to standard set of Common Lisp operators, in quest for Sufficiently Smart Compiler. Also that 'everything is an expression' passage is very useful.