When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

I started to practice Lisp in 2004 (after I struggled a little bit with SICP book aka Purple Book back in 2003). I started with SBCL+ilisp+GNU Emacs (v.21.3.1)on Debian GNU/Linux PC.

What led you to try Lisp?

Speaking to Chris Stephenson (head of CS department at Istanbul Bilgi University), reading Paul Graham's articles, SICP, exchanging interesting e-mails with Bulent Murtezaoglu and browsing the comp.lang.lisp as well as taking a look at the online version of Peter Seibel's book "Practical Lisp". I must add my boredom after programming VBScript, JScript, DHTML, SQL and T-SQL for the last 5 years.

Now I'm taking an AI course as a cognitive science MA student and the textbook used for the course is by Norvig & Russell and as far as I can see they also consider Lisp as their primary choice for implementing the stuff in the book.

Where did your road originate?
Started programming BASIC on a Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. Later C, some assembly, and then SQL, PL/SQL, T-SQL, VBScript, JScript (in the context of MS Active Server Pages programming), awk, bash, Perl.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Still a beginner. Following Seibel's yet-to-be-published book. After that I plan to read and practice "On Lisp".

What do you think of Lisp so far?
I had a loaded math.and engineering curriculum as a graduate of ITU and I can say that Lisp looks to be a very elegant language to the mathematically inclined.