I, Jochen Schmidt?, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:
When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it? It was in 1998. I had learned about Lisp through Emacs.
What led you to try Lisp?
I was writing a scriptable IRC-bot in C++ and looked for a embeddable scripting language. I knew that my editor (Emacs) is scriptable and looked into it. After realizing that Lisp might be a quite well suited for my purposes, I tried to find an embeddable Lisp and found the Scheme implementation Guile. It did work out, but I started to like Lisp more and more while using it and so thought about reimplementing my IRC-bot Lisp. I wanted to use a native compiler and found CMUCL. Since that time I've used Common Lisp for most projects I've done. IOW... I never looked back ;-)What other languages have you been using most?
C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript and perhaps Oracle PLSQLHow far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? I think quite far. I tried to suck in every bit of information I found. "On Lisp" was one of my first Common Lisp books shortly followed by the PAIP and SICP and a bit later the AMOP. On Lisp was an eye opener on macros. PAIP demonstrated how to write fast code that still is comprehensible. The AMOP was the book that is fault that I'm now a real CLOS and MOP fan. After two years of my studies (November 2000) I felt safe enough to write a series of articles for a german magazine about Common Lisp. Nowadays, I still write articles about lisp if my time permits it. In June 2007 I founded a Common Lisp based company.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
I always said CL should really mean Compiler Language instead of Common Lisp. Macros, COMPILE and EVAL and a simple mapping from syntax to AST make it easy to invent your own domain-specific languages.
CL is what one could call the only real meta language; there is no other language which makes it so easy to invent your own special purpose programming language (believe me - I've tried quite a few; even those who actually call themselves meta language).
I think CL has one of the best error-handling mechanisms (conditions and restarts), one of the best OO substrates (CLOS+MOP) and a very pragmatic view of the functional featureset.
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