When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it? The first exposure that stuck was during a class in graduate school in 1979. This was at the University of Maryland, using some dialect on a Univac 1108. I particularly remember writing out flowcharts for some 10-liner homework assignments, and realizing that the Lisp code was clearer than the flowcharts. I had encountered Lisp as an undergrad, courtesy of a monograph with a coiling paper tape on the cover entitied "LISP for FORTRAN Programmers". Would you believe an introduction to Lisp that did not use recursion? Nothing but PROGs, tags, and GOTOs. *shudder* And the implementation we used as part of that language survey course was on an IBM mainframe, accessed via 3270 non-scrolling terminals. What led you to try Lisp? It was the language of AI at the time, and I wanted to get into the field. What other languages have you been using most? C and Java recently. How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? I've been an implementor for Franz Lisp (University of Maryland distribution, early 1980's) and Xerox Common Lisp (1986 - 1993). I've written non-trivial systems in Franz Lisp, Common Lisp, and SIOD.
What do you think of Lisp so far? Lisp has always fit the way I think and work better than anything else. Switch Date 1970s