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?
In 1988 I started working at Apple Computer. I was a self-taught 6502 assembler programmer with a reading interest in programming languages. I thought Smalltalk sounded cool and Lisp sounded weird. I tried the development environment now known as Macintosh Common Lisp and it hooked me. The hook was set deeper later that year when I spent a bunch of time with a Symbolics machine. I also tried and enjoyed MacScheme.
What led you to try Lisp?
I played with various development tools out of curiosity. Lisp was the one that took hold and grew.
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 have never been particularly unhappy with any programming language. II simply found, after a while, that I thought in Lisp. It turned out that, although Lisp was not my first programming language, it was my native language.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)
Far enough to have written my own interpreters, compilers, and virtual machines. Not far enough for anyone else to have made much use of them.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
I don't think of Lisp. I think in lisp.
Switch Date 1980s RtL Language Curiosity RtL Work