When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
I first purchased a Lisp interpreter for the Sinclair QL in about 1986. This was a port of Acorn Lisp for the BBC-B Microcomputer to the QL.

What led you to try Lisp?
A collegue showed me a Lisp interpreter.... Initially I viewed Lisp as a structured macro-processor, but soon I realised it was much more.

Where did your road originate?
Well I was a heavy user of character based macro-processors for code generation (e.g. GPM, m4). I found them great but excrutiating to debug and to write code with any structure. There had to be a better way, and then I was introduced to Lisp...a programmer's koan.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Soon after I stumbled into Lisp I decided to write my own. I found a paper which made it look simple ( Timothy P. Hart and Thomas G. Evans, "Notes on Implementing Lisp for the M-460 Computer", in "THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE Lisp: Its Operation and Applications", Information International Inc. March 1964. )

Ever since then I have spent more time hacking C and C++ inside my interpreter than writing good Lisp code. (Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." Which accurately sums up my interpeter.) In doing so I have studied a lot of material and learned huge amounts about Lisp. In hindsight I wish I had spent more time coding in someone elses Lisp. However I should like to add the following maxim:

In my own Lisp I write demo web apps bring to life proposals for work collegues. Because I'm using Lisp, it's easy to hack-a-demo in my lunch breaks. In the past I've used Lisp to solve problems for collegues which have been 'too difficult' in ordinary languages. I guess I'm like many Lisp users - we use Lisp in the background to support production but Lisp never gets used in frontline production applications.

What do you think of Lisp so far?
I just wish that the CL implementations available would do everything I want to do for free. Decent Lisp costs big bucks. Therefore I keep adding to my own Lisp interpreter. It now has an embedded web server, Lisp Server Pages, SQL database, XML parser etc.. so I can write web apps.

The Lisp literature and its community are usually years ahead of the pack. Most language features I have ever seen are already in Lisp. Lisp allows me to play with ideas so quickly. Lisp continues to do it for me. Yes!

Lately I have been designing a new Lisp language codenamed Genyris.