I, Ora Lassila?, 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? In 1983, while a freshman in college, I tried MacLisp (of Project MAC, nothing to do with Macintosh which hadn't been announced yet) and never looked back. I subsequently wrote my own Lisp interpreter (for Apple II, in 6502 assembler); it had lazy evaluation and tail-recursion elimination. Soon after that, I founded a startup company to produce a Common Lisp compiler and programming environment. That was a lot of fun, but also painful. Ultimately, the company failed, but it taught me a lot about Common Lisp.

What led you to try Lisp? While in high-school (perhaps about 1980) I found Herbert Stoyan's book "Lisp Programmierhandbuch" which originally got me interested in the language. I had no computer at the time, and had to wait until college to actually try the language.

What other languages have you been using most? C, C++, Java, Javascript, Applescript, earlier also Pascal and various assemblers.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? Quite far. Currently, I use Common Lisp and make frequent use of the CLOS metaobject protocol. I don't really want to use other programming languages anymore...

What do you think of Lisp so far? My favorite programming language. I'd like to see more platforms targeted, though (embedded platforms, mobile devices, etc.).

Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: Switch Date 1980s

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