When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
I am one of the one's who had several small-scale outings with Lisp, ranging from doodling around with XLisp and trying to build Smalltalk in it, to a 4th year university project to implement a CL system (in which I eventually elected not to participate). The 'no-turning back'point came as a combination of my decision to get really serious about learning to use Emacs (actually XEmacs) and my adoption of SCWM as the Emacs equivalent for window managers. I was extremely pleased at how economical Lisp/Scheme code was.
It wasn't until I started to develop S2 that I really realized the power of programming in the Lisp family of languages. I made many of the usual mistakes, especially getting a little bit too excited over the possibilities of advanced macrology, but there was no denying that I was finding Scheme to be one of the most productive programming platforms I had ever used.
What led you to try Lisp?
I needed to hack a family finacial system that would run on Unix. I was able to get it up and running using Emacs Lisp in an apallingly short time. I shifted to Scheme because my attempts at programming SCWM just felt overall cleaner (modulo Guile's at-that-time apalling module constructs). Once I realized how similiar Scheme's semantics were to my other favorite nobody-will-pay-me-to-program-in-this-language SML,I was hooked.
Where did your road originate?
OOP. Most definitely. I had fooled with Lisp in the AI context for years, but it was when I found my way back to Lisp through examing the foundations of OOP (and by extension all programming) that I decided that Scheme was a lovely sweet-spot in language design.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I'm involved in standardization efforts for Scheme, but only as a bit player. I love programming in Scheme.
What do you think of Lisp so far? It's the best programming language since Smalltalk, and is even better in some important ways.
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RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Emacs Elisp