Lifetime Achievement Awards
"For excellent technical writing, for spreading the word "On Lisp" to programmers everywhere, for his campaign against spam, and for Making Big Money with Lisp"
"Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining." Paul Graham's Road to Lisp
The Highlight Film ...now has a new home: RtL Highlight Film
Former holders of a coveted position in the Top Ten:
Marco Baringer's Road to Lisp: "I didn't realize that I kept looking at new programming languages because I didn't like what I had found so far."
Kenny Tilton's Road to Lisp: A cautionary tale: someone who had to be hit over the head to switch to Lisp even though the project had been protoyped with great success and fun in Logo. But then: "The next few weeks involved everyone taking turns running to each other's desk to show them neat new features we'd just discovered."
Jock Cooper: "I was always consolidating code in C, taking similar functions and combining them, trying to drive the behavior by passing in function pointers and flags etc. I also used to try to reuse code by using C macros..."
And now for the moment for which you all have been waiting, Kenny's personal favorites, for what they say about Lisp:
A long Road with many stops for such a young driver. The view from the fast lane.
I love the Pascal! No, C++! Wait, Java!! sequence his high school went through. Just the beginning of his road: "...and thus, the return to Lisp after Pascal, Scheme (aborted), C, C++, Java and PHP..."
8. Brian Mastenbrook - Road to Lisp
"As time goes on I keep an active interest in other programming languages, but I find it hard to get excited about any of their "new" features, as most of these are just reimplementations of bits and pieces of Common Lisp."
"I wondered how many decades I would have to wait before someone created such a thing..."
"I wanted a language that I could use to investigate ideas and algorithms that wouldn't get in the way."
"So I went back and looked at the Lisp articles and such, and the parentheses weren't looking so bad after all,..."
4. John Pallister's road to Lisp
"...the whole code-is-data idea has permeated my entire design and allowed me to imagine a system far more subtle...".
"...for two or three years leading up to reading that Paul Graham article I had been developing a document containing hundreds of ideas I'd had for an ideal language..."
2. Thomas F Burdick's Road to Lisp
So many people try to do Lisp with other languages that Greenspun has a rule about it, but Thomas might be the first person to end up inside a compiler in the process. "[A gcc guru] told me that I should look at Lisp."
...and Kenny's Number One Favorite Road to Lisp story:
1. Pascal Costanza's Road To Lisp
Finally! The man who stood up to Richard Gabriel's hype. Kinda.