When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
Interlisp in 1983.
What led you to try Lisp?
I wanted to do AI, and Lisp was said to be the language of it. Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining. (The other options at the time were C, Pascal, Fortran, PL/1, Basic and APL.)
Where did your road originate?
Up till then I had programmed mostly in Basic and PL/1.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Far enough to be convinced that any really good language is going to have to include JMC's 7 axioms, and therefore to be a dialect of Lisp. There's no evading something so simple.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
I like Lisp-the-platonic-form, but I don't like a lot of the features of currently popular dialects.
Switch Date 1980s | RtL AI