When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

Friday, 19 November 2004. I rewrote one of my company's PHP web applications using CMUCL and Portable AllegroServe. Later that evening, using CLISP, I rewrote thirteen shell and Perl scripts we had been using to manage servers for our clients. There was no turning back. By Spring of 2005, my business partner and I had settled upon LispWorks for our cross-platform Linux, Unix, OS X, and Windows application development.

What led you to try Lisp?

Ultimately, discontent.

Discontent with the tedious and disjointed development pattern induced by lengthy write-compile-run cycles. Discontent with new languages trading one set of shortcomings for another. Discontent with having to use more than half a dozen of them to achieve sufficient coverage for all of my work. Discontent with innovation in development environments consisting of little more than new toolbars and context-sensitive pop-ups. Discontent with OOP, as realised in C++ and Java, becoming an end in and of itself. Discontent with bookstore shelves filled with books proselytising the half-baked arcanum of this month's version of Java and C#. Discontent with not finding a copy of The Art of Computer Programming on those same shelves. Discontent with PHP as the alternative to Java or .Net for developing web applications (and ill at the thought of not having an alternative).

Fortunately, I had recently read some of Paul Graham's essays and recalled his references to Lisp and Viaweb. From there, it was a very short road to Lisp.

What other languages have you been using most?

I started my career fourteen years ago writing system and application code in assembly, C, and C++. As I moved into the web application and system administration markets, I began to spend more time writing in PHP, Perl, Python, VB, Java, SQL, and the Unix shell.

As a former biologist, I have always appreciated Perl's capacity to evolve to fill new niches. However, the limitations of its syntax were clear. Python promised much of Perl's flexibility with greater clarity, but still there were arbitrary dead-ends. Java... Java felt like an insult to my intelligence. My business partner tried Borland Delphi for one project, but it only added to our language fragmentation concerns.

Regardless of the language, I struggled to write programs in a Lisp-like fashion without even knowing it. Function tables and pointers predominated my designs. I patiently coaxed C pre-processor macros and C++ templates into doing things I was too naive to realise they shouldn't. I sought data-based solutions wherever possible, preferring SQL's set transformation power over procedural tedium of C, Perl, and PHP.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I first skimmed Paul Graham's online copy of On Lisp and started following c.l.l. Shortly thereafter, I purchased and started reading Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and David B. Lamkins's Successful Lisp. Excellent literature and discussions.

By no means a Lisp guru, I am, however, using Lisp for some production development and all Unix system administration. Admittedly, at this point, I am using Lisp as little more than a better C/PHP/Perl/shell, but every day I see new opportunities to write code in ways I've only dreamed of before.

Over the next year, my business partner and I plan to use Lisp for all new development and to migrate our major existing applications.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

As a Lisp neophyte I can only anticipate the deep magic others have spoken of here. However, as an experienced programmer who, essentially, has been searching for the thing called Lisp his entire career, I grokked some of the power of Lisp immediately:

• Lisp facilitates interactive development to a degree that I myself have not seen before in a procedural or OO programming language; only a SQL DBMS query interface comes close;
• Strong typing does not necessarily mean static typing; the implications of that are profound and liberating;
• To me, the combination of s-expressions, exposure of the reader-evaluator boundary, and the macro system is such a simple, elegant, and comprehensive solution to a problem that OOP never did fully address before taking on a life of its own;
• In ways that no other language or tool can, Lisp provides an environment for exploring your programming problem and its solution; and
• Yes, I like the parentheses; the advantages seem obvious, the disadvantages nonexistent.