Martin Mikelsons
The Road to Lisp Questions

I, Martin Mikelsons, do solemnly offer 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?

It was 1973 and the Lisp was Lisp360, and IBM dialect. Switch Date 1970s

What led you to try Lisp?

A course in computational logic tought be J A Robinson.

RtL Formal Education

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 doing simple theorem proving in APL but dealing with dynamic tree structures was becoming increasingly difficult.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I never used APL again, and eventually became a Lisp developer working on Lisp/VM, Lucid CL, and most recently Allegro CL.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I think that Lisp is simply great for implementing stuff you dont know how to implement. You start with a simplistic solution that only works in a few ridiculous test cases and evolve it into a final product, but you hardly ever stop and rewrite from scratch.