Here are these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

When did you first try Lisp (meaning here and throughout the survey "any member of the Lisp family") seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

1989; a dialect of Scheme.

What led you to try Lisp?

SICP?. ---side note to Peter Siebel: I hope your book becomes the future SICP that gets students excited about Lisp! (happy grin)

If you were trying Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, what was that other language and what did you not like about it, or what were you hoping to find different in Lisp?

I was curious about all the different languages I could find. Scheme led to LAMBDA, and LAMBDA, of course, leads to Lisp.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)

If 1 is a novice, and 10 is a guru, I'd say I'm a 3rd-level Lisp Hacker. (I.e., I am not a guru, but I always make my saving roll vs. Object Oriented Illusion, and my +3 LAMBDA-Mace is pretty good at smiting the OOP Infidels.)

What do you think of Lisp so far?

It's a useful tool. Though I currently use Python (the language, not the CMUCL compiler) for my work-related code, I can see that someday this will prove annoying enough that I will surely switch over to Lisp. (On my wish-list of Lisp things, I'd like to have a standard function library as rich as Python's, that will run with GCL? or CLISP?...)

Lisp supports functional, imperative, logical, and object-oriented solutions to problem, but does not force you to solve a problem in only one style. You can choose whatever paradigms are useful for solving the immediate problem. Other languages give you one, or sometimes two choices; Lisp gives you the whole menu.

It's interesting to see that several of the early functional programming languages were implemented in Lisp; that the first Smalltalk system was implemented in Lisp; that early experiments with resolution (that led to Prolog), were done with Lisp; and that Common Lisp was the first OOP language to get ANSI standardization. So, in some sense, Lisp was very influential to each of these alternatives to the Fortran/ALGOL line of programming evolution.

(I think Lisp is the endpoint of programming language evolution, too, but I'll save that for another day...)