When did you first try Lisp (meaning here and throughout the survey "any member of the Lisp family") seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
Eh, seriously? Common Lisp (CLISP), around October 2002. Switch Date 2002
What led you to try Lisp?
RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Paul Graham
I read plenty of good reviews of the language(jargon file, articles, etc), and then i saw a Lisp book by David Touretzky(sp?) at my school's library. I borrowed it(i was the first to borrow it since ~1989(!)), skipped the parts where functions were explained, and got pulled in. It was exactly like reading a good book; not only was the writing very good, but the language itself was extremely interesting. However, i'd say that the single thing that made me want to try out Lisp the msot was an appendix to that book where most control constructs were redefined using smaller elements.
If you were trying Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, what was that other language and what did you not like about it, or what were you hoping to find different in Lisp?
I did not try Lisp out of unhappiness with another language, but i definitely prefer it to C-likes; I still like Tcl, simply because it's such a lovable small language
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)
Erh. Not far? I'd say i'm at the stage where i have to start doing real things to further my learning - for example, remaking animals, and then moving on to more complicated projects.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Lisp needs emacs to be usable - Seriously, parenthesis matching is simply a must. Apart from that, the language itself is very clean, without lots of special cases, etc, making it easy to learn and use.