I, Nathan Bloomfield, 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? During my Java-centric data structures class as an undergraduate. (Math major with a peculiar interest in compsci.) Data structures were interesting, but Java was not; I ended up playing with Scheme instead of finishing my projects. I got a C in the class. :) After I watched Abelson and Sussman's lectures and read Backus' Turing award speech I was hooked; I also read most of Paul Graham's essays.

What led you to try Lisp?

As a wee lad I found the Hacker's Dictionary in my school's library. That book told strange and wonderful tales of wizards using tools called `Unix' and the `PDP-7', with magic spells written in many different languages, but the most elegant of these was called Lisp. After that I forgot about it until college. As a side project I tried to write a theorem prover in C, which, of course, went nowhere. My interest in ATP came from my experience as a math student, not a compsci student. I thought about that problem for a long time with no success, although I learned a lot in the process. A prof suggested I use Scheme instead of C, and so it began.

What other languages have you been using most?

C.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? Not far enough. :) I've started looking into category theory to see what wonders await there. More recently I stared using Haskell; type safety is attractive, but all that syntactic sugar feels more like cyanide to me. I really like the simplicity of pure Lisp. It may take a minute to see what a Lisp function does, but when most functions are less than 5 lines long it doesn't matter so much.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

It's great. What's more significant, I think, is that it's a nice introduction to functional programming, which can be reasoned about independently of any particular language, machine, or implementation.

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Switch Date 2006

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RtL Eric Raymond