I, _Matt Knox, 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.
After several head-fakes at lisp starting in late 2003, I started working my way through SICP, LISP, HTDP, On Lisp, and about every other book I could get my hands on, and finally stuck in the lisp family around july or august, 2004. Most of the coding I have done so far has been in scheme, primarily PLT. I am now shopping around for a Lisp-2 to try out.
What led you to try Lisp?
Graham initially, as with most people, I'm sure. Then I got involved in LispNYC when I met Heow Eide-Goodman, and after that escape was all but impossible.
What other languages have you been using most?
My first program was in Fortran, and shortly after that, I tried C, then Perl, then a whole mess of others. I have been paid to deploy code in C/C++, Perl, Java, javascript, and PHP. I hope to soon get to do some scheme or lisp at work also.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Hard to answer, I know. Just looking for a rough idea.
I am probably OK in theoretical areas, but I don't know much of anything yet. I don't know that I am even worthy of "newbie" yet.
What do you think of Lisp so far? I find some of the "onions" in CL to be mildly annoying (lisp-2 vs lisp-1, and verbose syntax for simple things like array reference/hash tables), and I have a hard time doing all of the practical stuff like interfacing with the OS, etc.. That said, since I have started up in lisp, I am both measurably better at other languages, and immeasurably more frustrated by the limitations of those languages. I worry a great deal about the lisp community-there is a complacency that smells very dangerous to me, mostly on issues of improving CL. I think that lisp is fantastic, and that CL is probably the best lisp out there for developing applications today, but I think that both lisp itself and (certainly) the implementations can be improved. I hope I can contribute to one or both of those goals.
Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: Switch Date 2004
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