I, Donnie Cameron, 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?
Many of us had multiple run-ins with Lisp before it "stuck". The "stick" date is of most interest, but you can share earlier encounters if you like.

I first encountered Lisp in 1987, when I owned an Amiga computer. I wanted to learn it because it seemed interesting, but at the time I didn't understand just how powerful the language was or how much good it might have done me to learn it. Early in 2006, I started making a more serious effort to learn Lisp, despite the fact that my job and my family leave me almost no spare time at all. I've been stealing a few minutes here and there from work and from my family to learn little bits and pieces of Common Lisp.

What led you to try Lisp?

Near the beginning of 2006, after learning about Ruby and Python and other new languages, I determined that I wasn't going to be able to learn them all well. So I began a serious effort to determine which was the most powerful computer language available at the time, the language I was going to focus on learning first. I thought that language would turn out to be one of the new ones, probably Ruby. But I learned quickly that Lisp, one of the oldest languages around, had the most features and the most flexibility. And when I started pouring through the code of different languages, the Lisp code always seemed the cleanest.

What other languages have you been using most?

Perl, C#, XQuery

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.

I haven't gotten very far. I've managed to learn enough to be able to write small functions such as various versions of is-prime and factor. I've also solved a number of word problems on projecteuler.net. But I haven't written any full-fledged programs and I still have a long ways to go with Macros and with general knowledge of the built-in functions. I have come to master the loop macro though, and I love it. (I know that it is not loved by some in the Lisp community).

What do you think of Lisp so far?

Like everyone else, I'm quite impressed with the capabilities of the language. But one thing that took me by surprise is that I am now a far better Perl programmer (to the point where I've become a superstar at work) only for having learned Lisp. Higher order functions, closures, and other tricks that I gleaned from my limited foray into Lisp have changed the way that I write Perl code to the extent that the resulting programs are now significantly shorter (in terms of the total number of lines of code used to perform a function). So I'm hooked and I struggle sometimes to find a few minutes to go write a small function in Lisp. I would love to become a Lisp programmer one day. Hopefully by then Lisp will be more accessible, have better libraries, and see the recognition that it deserves. I would be very pleased if Lisp began evolving one day toward working well with other languages.

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

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