I, Drew Crampsie, 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?
April 2004, Common Lisp
What led you to try Lisp?
I needed a better language for web development and the scripting family was no longer cutting it (php, python, perl, ruby etc). With the exception of php, none of the aformentioned languages were developed specifically with the web in mind, and the amount of boilerplate i was seeing in my code was starting to scare me. php was designed as a hypertext preproccessor, not an application development platform, and so did not fare any better.
Tired of re-implementing the same functionality over and over again, I began to design my own language based on Lua and C , with specific functionality for WWW application development (this is apparently a Supergreenspun, but what did i know). While doing some research (and after a prototype implementation of my new language), my road led me to lisp. It seemed ideal, and still does.
What other languages have you been using most?
Perl, C, Java when prompted, PHP if neccessary, python, ruby.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I've developed and delivered data driven web apps using UncommonWeb, portable aserve, and CLSQL. I've just begun some macro-ology... fun! I use lisp almost exclusively now, with the odd Perl script sneaking in. I've just started to use Lisp instead of XSLT for XML transformations as well.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Lisp is both perfect and flawed, like a real world system should be. I can do things in lisp i never dreamed possible coming from a C background. It takes a lot of lisp before you even begin to imagine there could be anything wrong with it...
I'm a Software Developer at the Tech Co-op (http://tech.coop), a member owned, non-profit technical services organisation.
I do most of our development in Lisp, along with some perl, python and XSLT. I try to avoid Java whenever possible.
drewc drew@tech.coopUm, sorry, by adding Daniel Bobrow's CLOS video from archive.org... I think I somehow fuxored up the AudioVideo page -- it's blank and somehow uneditable. -- Tayssir that was very wierd. I fixed the problem by overwriting the newer file with the previous version. can you try again? I'd like to see that video :).
Switch Date 2004
RtL comp-lang-lisp | Seek and Ye Shall Find | RtL Greenspun's Tenth | RtL Paul Graham | RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Word of Mouth
