I, Brad Beveridge, 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?
I first tried Lisp in August 2005, initially I tried CMUCL but found it had horrible consing when doing simple FFI OpenGL stuff. Little did I know that I was running uncompiled forms. At the time it was easier to switch to SBCL which compiles everything, I've used SBCL on Linux or OS X almost exclusively since then.
What led you to try Lisp?
I think I read a Paul Graham article linked from Slashdot, it was probably "Beating the averages". He made some good points, particularly about only being able to look down along the language power line and see short comings of less powerful languages. It is hard to look upward and see advantages in the more powerful languages.
What other languages have you been using most?
I'm an embedded systems programmer by day and I dabble in 3D games at night. C is perfect for my day job, but for hobby stuff I want to use a language that I enjoy. C is not really expressive enough for large projects, and after writing a decent amount of a 3D engine in C++ I was reconvinced that C++ really is something that needs to be taken out and shot. I dabbled with Python and really liked it, but couldn't get over the fact it was interpreted - I always felt like there was a ceiling I'd hit with it (though I may be less biased these days.) I also tried D for a while, really nice language and what C++ should be, but fundamentally not special the way Lisp is. I think that reading PCL's chapter on macros really started to give me an idea of how powerful Lisp can be, and honestly no other language I've tried can give you that DSL quality that makes Lisp so cool.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
A little way :) I wrote some toy applications at the start when I was learning. I posted a bit in CLL, and had the idea of forming a janitor system for newbies - it became CL Gardeners. I became frustrated early on that the only really good free development environment is Emacs and Slime - I'm a Vi guy. Larry Clapp and I got together to start a project to bring Slime to Vim, we have ECL running in Vim - Vim ECL - and we're making good progress.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Love it - even though I don't know it that well it is my language of choice for most things.
Switch Date 2005
