I, James Fleming, while bored at my desk do offer these responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:
When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
It was scheme, in or around 2003. I forget which implementations, but I tried several. I eventually concluded that, despite scheme's beauty in its elegance, I couldn't see how to make practical use of it.
Many of us had multiple run-ins with Lisp before it "stuck". The "stick" date is of most interest.
The "stick" date is right after Practical Common Lisp was published: 2005. A friend mentioned it, so I had a look at the online version. Then I wgot the site, to have a copy on my laptop to refer to at leisure. Then I gave in and bought the book. It kinda kept growing on me from there.
What led you to try Lisp?
A concatenation of things. I've long been fascinated by programming, and have tried all sorts of languages from Sinclair Basic to Ruby, but none of them "grabbed" me.
Many years ago, a friend had raved about this programmable programming language, in which data could be executed and code manipulated as data. I was a sysadmin then, and not a programmer (some would say nothing's changed) so thought of it as something interesting, but beyond me.
I read about it in ESR's "How to become a hacker." Filed the reference away in my mind.
Like any half-decent (half-baked?) unix admin, I learned basic shell programming, and became middling useful in perl and PHP. The ugliness of perl eventually overcame me, and I searched in revolt for an elegant language. The internet appeared to be unanimous on the point that scheme is the epitome, with CL its large, hairy-armpitted, but more practical older sibling.
Paul Graham's essays, linked from Slashdot, fomented interest in this lisp creature. If it was that readily malleable, it had to be worth investigating.
Then PCL came out and showed me how to actually get to grips with the beast, and I was history.
What other languages have you been using most?
Perl and PHP, with smatterings of shell and the usual sysadmin utilities. I try to avoid other languages now, as they're painful in comparison.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.
Well, I've happily built a web-based gallery/shopping cart on araneida, through which I'm about to start operating my first business. No, I don't usually do things the easy way :)
What do you think of Lisp so far?
I second two quotes from others: it feels like lightning between the fingertips (Glenn Ehrlich), and it just gets better every day (Scott McIntyre).
Once you have the hang of it, the language just gets out of your way and lets you get on with writing your programme. And no other language I've tried so far allows me to express ideas within an order of magnitude of lisp's conciseness - repetition now feels like a bug to be eliminated.
With CL, I keep feeling like I'm trying to step on a stair that isn't there; rough sketches of code keep accidentally turning out to be the working version. I'm forever quickly blocking out sections of code as scaffolding to be debugged, and discovering that they work exactly as desired. Much time has been lost in sitting back, looking in amazement at the incredibly compact code that somehow fulfilled the need, having taken maybe a tenth of the expected time and effort.
I'm a vim-user. I've tried emacs several times, with the best of intentions, but it just feels like a clumsy short-cut to carpal tunnel issues - apparently I'm more attuned to the serial than the parallel, in that respect. Larry Clapp's vilisp was therefore a huge boon; I use it constantly.
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