I,
Jacek Generowicz, do solemnly offer these my responses to
The Road to Lisp Survey:
[This originally appeared as an article on comp.lang.lisp in response to Kenny Tilton's question about who lured us to lisp.]
How about Bjarne Stroustrup ?
Somewhere[*] he wrote that (I paraphrase) "C++ don't do no double
dispatch, if you want that you need to go to a language such as Common
Lisp". At this point it struck me that my image of Lisp (cute
functional language with more parentheses than practical potential)
must be rather flawed. And thus the seed was planted: whenever a
reference was made to Lisp I paid attention, and the things I was
hearing sounded good.
The final straw came when I was working on a Python/C++ project, and
it struck me that I really wanted a dynamically typed language, like
Python, that would allow me to program without any type declarations
during development, but, when I needed to squeeze the the most out of
my CPU, would allow me to provide declarations and to compile to
efficient machine code (as opposed to having to re-write the relevant
chunk as an extension module in C++).
I wondered how many decades I would have to wait before someone
created such a thing (utterly convinced that no such thing could exist
today, for, if it would, then we'd ALL be using it, right?), tried to
see whether any research was being done in this direction, found
Dylan, which turned out to be, well ... Lisp.
I promptly downloaded Clisp, and was stunned to find that so many
things I had craved for in a programming language over the years I had
dabbled with programming, were there along with plenty more which I
never dreamed of.
[*] I thought that it was it
The C++ Programming Languge, but I
can't seem to find it in there, just now.
Estimated
Switch Date 2001 Seek and Ye Shall Find
RtL Bjarne Stroustrup