I, Peter Lewerin, 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?
Around 1987, AutoLisp.
What led you to try Lisp?
In the late eighties, I did some AutoLisp programming for Volvo. This was my first major coding experience (I had only used Basic earlier) and even if I didn't really "get" Lisp at that time, the experience stayed with me and made me dissatisfied with the more popular languages in the eighties and nineties.
Then in 2001, I became involved in the Tcl/Tk community, and consequently started to look at Lisp again. In the process of writing a limited Lisp interpreter in Tcl I seemed to get attached to Lisp again. I still see my 1987 encounter with Lisp as crucial not only for my connection to Lisp, but for my whole outlook on programming.
I should also mention Erik Naggum, whose postings on comp.lang.lisp were intriguing and thought-provoking (and sometimes just "provoking") enough to get me hooked on that newsgroup -- and you really can't stay for long on c.l.l. without getting interested in Lisp.
What other languages have you been using most?
Pascal, C/C++, Perl, Tcl (and numerous others briefly).
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I'm comfortable, "fluent", with it, but my "vocabulary" is still a bit limited. I think I've covered most of the generally useful areas except for the condition system, which I have only tried a couple of times.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Take any set of programming languages and remove everything that shouldn't be there, and you're basically left with Lisp. Seriously.
Switch Date 1980s RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Work | RtL Erik Naggum | RtL AutoCad AutoLisp