When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
I remember encountering Lisp by accident in 1999. It was first Scheme, but I went for Common Lisp some weeks later.
What led you to try Lisp?
At this time, nobody that I knew used or even had an idea about Lisp at my university. Most of my projects were done in C++ or just C. I've been very interested in cryptography and network protocols. In one toy C++ project I wanted to add a scripting interface and looked for some options. I knew my editor (Emacs) was scriptable in "Lisp", found Guile, the embeddable Scheme and integrated it into my program. Several weeks later I found programming in Lisp much more sane than anything I was used to before. I recoded my project in one afternoon in CLISP and was shocked: The code was significantly shorter and more extensible; the interactive development was particularily suited to network server programming and the numerical tower of Common Lisp made experimenting with cryptography a pleasure. After struggling for years with the idiosyncracies of C++, I immediately felt at home with this language.
What other languages have you been using most?
Before Lisp: C,C++, Python, Oracle PLSQL
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I used Lisp as my main prototyping and implementation language for the last 10 years. Lisp still manages to surprise me in a positive way.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Common Lisp is by far my favorite language. It not only made my coding much more efficient, it also did spark a general interest in studying programming languages and their concepts. One reason for this is certainly, that Lisp is unique in its ability to adopt (if not to say assimilate ;-) ) new language concepts. Common Lisp is Borg, resistence is futile, your concepts will be assimilated.
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