I, Bruce Durling?, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey: 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?
Switch Date 2003 I started getting into emacs to write my MSc dissertation in LaTeX after I swore I would never write another large document in Microsoft Word again. This opened the rabbit hole for me. I now use emacs for everything from mail, wikis, blogs, coding and as a PIM.

What led you to try Lisp?
| RtL Emacs Elisp | RtL Greenspun's Tenth | RtL Paul Graham
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emacs? exposed me to lisp and I started to read more about it and came across Paul Graham?'s work. His page and a number of others have lead me to wanting to do more with this language that seemed to be able to do everything. At one point I even wrote a system in XML and java that fulfilled Greenspun's Tenth Rule. So much work to do form and field validation. I even wrote to Paul Graham once and asked him where I should start with studying lisp. He suggested that I use MzScheme (that was a surpise). I didn't take his advice though. I've bought his book instead. I'm reading Paul Grahams's ANSI Common Lisp now and I have copies of SBCL? and Clisp? to play with. 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? REPL is what does it for me. I like the idea of having a programming language that I can experiment in quickly yet still has good run time speed. How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I'm ok with emacs lisp. I'm really just starting on Common Lisp. What do you think of Lisp so far? I love it so far. I like the small amount of syntax especially. Nothing seems to get in the way.