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I, David A. Thompson?, 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 early 2006. I tried cmucl, gcl, clisp, and sbcl side-by-side; I ended up adopting sbcl since it looked like it gave more of a good-faith effort to things like

SOME-LISP> (defun foo (x)
  (print x)
  (cond 
    ((= x 5) (print (* x x)))
    ((< x 5) (foo (+ x 1))) 
    ((> x 5) (foo (- x 1)))))

SOME-LISP> (foo 5000000)

relative to some of the other implementations.

What led you to try Lisp?

I'm a cell/molecular biologist. I first tried Lisp in early 2006 when I became interested in the theory of self-replicating entities. Its syntax and potential for introspection was the main attraction (the ability to represent and manipulate programs readily as sexps).

What other languages have you been using most?

These days perl and, until I met lisp, python.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I'd say I'm one tier above the novice level. Mainly, I've steered clear of diving into planet macrology...

What do you think of Lisp so far?

There was definitely a distinct point where 'the light went on' a month or two after I started writing code in lisp. Once the light went on, I regretted much of the investment of time I've made writing code in other languages -- especially once I became aware of the libraries available for lisp which make things like regex, etc. relatively straightforward. More significantly, I've found that lisp encourages me to think about structuring a program in a different (better?) way than many of the other languages I've used (this goes all the way back to middle-school forays in the 80's in 6502 machine language programming to entertaining myself with forth back in high school...).

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Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: Switch Date 2006

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