I, Jimmy Miller, do solemnly offer these as my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

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

The first time I tried Lisp (specifically Common Lisp) was after I had about a year of programming experience. At first, I disregarded it as a toy language, despite what people were saying about it; I didn't seriously look at Lisp until I read Paul Graham's essays on it. I've tried Scheme as well, but I prefer Common Lisp.
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.

The first time I realized Lisp might be worthwhile was when I wrote two versions of a simple program, one in C and one in Lisp; the Lisp version was much more elegant and short than the C version. After that, I slowly learned and understood Lisp concepts like s-expressions and macros. I didn't become a full-on Lisp convert until later. I was playing around in the REPL when I realized that Lisp didn't have a C-style while loop, so I wrote my own; it was very easy to extend the language. It was then I began to understood why people said that Lisp was the most powerful programming language; you simply can't do things like that in C++ or Java.

What led you to try Lisp?

The amount of praise I heard other programmers throwing at it, and Paul Graham's essays.

What other languages have you been using most?

I'm interested in game programming, so mostly C and C++. I also use C#, Java, and Python sometimes.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I'm no guru yet, but I can write simple programs that user higher-order functions, macros, etc.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

It's an excellent programming language; I can't wait to find a project to use it on.

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Switch Date 2006

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