When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
Lik many, I first encountered it in college, and quite liked it, although I can't remember what dialect. I then had the opportunity, while working summers for a company, to write a very simple protoype expert system in Scheme on a Cromemco microcomputer. That was in, oh, about 1983. Although I later read Steele's CLtL (first edition), and learned many useful concepts from it, I didn't really do anything with Lisp again until about a year ago (2004).

What led you to try Lisp?

A college course, of course. What led me to return to it was a growing disatisfaction with C++ as I tried to do more complex work. I kept remembering how simple many of these things would be in Lisp. In fact, lately I've graduated to full-bore Greenspunning at work. A lot of discussion on C2 wiki about Lisp over the last few years finally motivated me to become reacquainted with it.

What other languages have you been using most?

C++, and a bit of Perl and Ruby now and again.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

Fairly far. I struggle more with issues like FFIs and defsystems than with the language itself. Although some of the subtleties of compile/load/run time evaluation stumped me for a while, and marginal pathname support in some implementations that I've tried also slowed me down.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

Love it. Wish some of the things mentioned above were more standardized or easier to get working on Windows, where I do most of my work.