I, Bob Bane?, 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?
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.