I, Mostafa Razavi?, 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?
I first tried Common Lisp on Summer 2006. The first implementation I used was GCL, after that CLISP, and then I tried every implementation I could!
What led you to try Lisp?
For sure it was Paul Graham's essays. I'm not quite sure how I first encountered his essays, but I think the first link I followed to his website was on Eric Raymond's "How to Become a Hacker".
What other languages have you been using most?
Until several months ago it was Visual Basic (at that time I was using Windows). Then I got into Python seriously and after I moved to Linux, I also moved from Python to Common Lisp (I still use Python as a scripting language and sometimes to do some university projects due to the vast standard library). I have also used C, especially at university, but I never liked writing LARGE programs in C. And by the way, the largest program I have ever written has been in a mixture of QuickBASIC and assembly!! (some 10000 lines in QB and about 3000 assembly lines, it was a few years ago and at that time I was a BIG QB fan!)
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I'm just on the beginning of the road, since although I know quite much about the language, I have little experience in practice, and I know that's vital.
I'm looking for some real thing to do in Lisp. I want something that I can enjoy doing, along with learning, and that something should also (hopefully) yield something useful, for me and others, at the end.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
In one sentence: it's the most beautiful language I've ever seen. (although, it's probably not quite true about the *big* Common Lisp.)
I'm not quite satisfied with current implementations. I look forward to the coming of Paul Graham's Arc. I have even considered creating a dialect myself.
