When did you first try Lisp (meaning here and throughout the survey "any member of the Lisp family") seriously, and which Lisp family member was it? Mid 80's using emacs under VMS. Started programming my editor and never looked back :-)

What led you to try Lisp? I was a language junkie early on, and just absorbed emacs lisp since it was there...and was even useful. Later on i managed to get a copy of CLTL1 and moved my lispish frame of mind to CommonLisp. Grabbed CLTL2 when it came out and read it through a few times as well. When I found out about AMOP, I immediately purchased it and still think it is one of my favorite reads.

If you were trying Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, what was that other language and what did you not like about it, or what were you hoping to find different in Lisp? I flowed into it...did not turn to it from something else...although now being comfortable with the dynamic languages (most specifically CL and Smalltalk), CompileLinkRun and static typing (ie. C,C++, Java) leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure) Pretty darn comfortable with it. Quite familiar with the spec, enough to know when what i want to do is covered somewhere and i can go in and look it up. This past year i have embraced the loop macro, and additionally become comfortable writing my own large scale macros (vs. simple helper macros). Currently diving back into AMOP and starting to experiment with MOP programming.

What do you think of Lisp so far? By far the most powerful language...i alternate back and forth between Smalltalk and CL depending upon my current projects and interests. The deciding factor is usually what libraries are available to quickly facilitate my needs. Unfortunately my day job is Java & J2EE. Not anymore...i've moved on to a place where we use Python. Not lisp, but sure beats the heck out of Java!