When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
It was around late 1985/early 1986; but I don't know what that Lisp version was called (I don't recall it calling itself anything other than "Lisp").
It was a Lisp-1, used ! to as a quote character in symbol names, and had an OBLIST command that returned a list of interned symbols.
I didn't pick up Common Lisp until 1996.
What led you to try Lisp?
I'd heard Lisp was supposed to be good for AI, and that interested me at the time. The first thing I remember using it for was to help map the maze in an adventure game -- you couldn't wander around dropping things to make a map because objects left in empty rooms got moved around, and you wouldn't find them in the same place, and paths between rooms were one-way only (you could go north from room A to room B, but there wasn't necessarily any way to go back from room B to room A without passing through 3 other rooms in the process).
I wrote a program to keep track of my movements and find paths between known points (initially, the entrance), and suggest sequences of moves that it could use to confirm guesses about whether two rooms were really the same room reached by different routes, etc., until it had a complete map.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
3.65 metres.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Love it!
Switch Date 1980s
RtL Language Curiosity|RtL Word of Mouth|RtL AI