Dave Pearson
Dave Pearson is a Person who likes to knock out the odd bit of free software from time to time. He's quite fond of Common Lisp.

http://www.davep.org/ is his home page.

Some of the CL code he's made available is:

*(nntp-dot-lisp)   - (nntp.lisp) NNTP client.
*(org-davep-dict)  - A dictd (RFC2229) client.
*(newsrc.lisp)     - ~/.newsrc reader.
*(slashdot.lisp)   - slashdot headline grabber (reads <A HREF="http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml">slashdot.xml</a>).
*(slashcache.lisp) - slashdot headline cache (useful for dialup users).


I, Dave Pearson, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

When did you first try Lisp seriously?

Assuming you mean Common Lisp I think it was sometime around 1998 or 1999, although I'd been dabbling with the language for a while before then.

Which Lisp did you try?

Common Lisp. Assuming you meant that anyway and what you're really asking is "which implementation of Common Lisp did you try" the answer would be Allegro and clisp.

What led you to try Lisp?

A desire to play with different languages. On top of that I was quite an avid GNU emacs user and I'd started to dabble with elisp. Getting to know elisp then lead me to playing with Common Lisp.

If you were trying Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, what was it and what did you not like about it, or what about Lisp were you hoping to find different?

If I knew what I was hoping to find that was different I probably wouldn't have found it different, would I?

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)

I've got far enough to write some code that I'm happy to let the world see. I'm not sure that's really a measure of anything but it's the best measure I can think of.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

If I were dropped on a desert island and told that I could have only one programming language to play with it would be Common Lisp.


Switch Date 1990s RtL Language Curiosity RtL Emacs Elisp