I, Mark McGinnis, 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? Meaning any member of the Lisp family. As for "when", many of us had multiple encounters with a Lisp before it really stuck. The "stick" date is of most interest.
I started learning lisp in september of 2003. I started with the Franz ACL lisp try and buy dem o product. I have since switched and remain undecided about whether to use CLisp or GNU Lisp. I am currently working through Peter Norvig's book on ai and lisp.
What led you to try Lisp?
I am in the search for the perfect language. Every language I try has been an adventure and I am looking for the best one. Lisp contains a group of features that make the language very interesting. Thus far I am still working to wrap my mind around some of the thngs like closures and and data to function to data transitions.
What other languages have you been using most?
Recently c++ and c#, but along the road I have delivered applications (been paid for) in fortran, basic, pascal, smalltalk, java, powerbuilder, c and sas.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? Hard to answer, I know. Just looking for a rough idea.
I have written some lines of some code that work sometimes, usually after significant effort. This language remings me of learning smalltalk, the curve is steep and the help is limited. That is not to say that people are unwilling to help, but more that self study books are difficult to find. I believe I would have never "gotten" smalltalk if it had not been for David smith's book, IBM Smalltalk, the language. What made it so important for me was that it had actual code that could be used to create blocks, create objects, what global variables (dictionaries) existed, what they contained, how to access them etc. I really like the Norvig book in that it does have examples (like the sentence generation program) which begin to show the glimmerings of the power of Lisp. I started with Paul Graham's book, ANSI Common Lisp but it was too consise for me. I am a newbiew after all. I believe it will become more useful once I know something.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
I like lisp so far. I would like to feel more accomplished at it, without having to put in so much effort, but c'est la vie. The transition to c and c++ from basic and pascal was trivial compared with the transition to Lisp. I feel the only way to really learn a language is to select a reasonably complex app and write it. Usually what I find is that the language make certain thing easy and certain things hard. On my road to the perfect language, writing an app is the only way to examine the guts of the language. I expect it will take the better part of a year (mostly done nights and weekends) to become write the app, rewrite the app and get confident I can move around in the environment. At that point I will most likely not be a newbie, but all bloody and grizzled.
Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: Switch Date 2003
This page is presently Uncategorized: RtL Peter Norvig
