I, Randall Randall, 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?

January 2004, Common Lisp.

What led you to try Lisp?

I'd already been convinced, since 1999 or 2000 when I'd read Eric Raymond's bit about Lisp making one a better programmer, that Lisp was my ultimate destination. Lisp was clearly the most expressive language I'd ever seen. However, I wasn't the best programmer in 1999 (hardly a programmer at all at the time, actually), and the learning curve seemed steep. So I read some Lisp tutorials, played around a bit with various Lisps and Schemes, and went back to writing things I could finish in various other languages. My progression was

1. Play with Lisp
2. Learn other language (PHP, Pike, Python)
3. Develop something useful in other language
4. Rinse, repeat.

So I really wanted to use Lisp, but kept bouncing off of it, because of my lack of formal CS education, and failure to find tutorials or books about Lisp that addressed problems I thought needed solving. I was pretty sick of lengthy explanations of car, cdr, caadr, and friends. In January, I read some of Paul Graham's articles, and reread some I'd seen before, and finally decided to buckle down again at it. I was going through a rather difficult time, and was too depressed to work, but learning Lisp seemed impractical enough to not set off my impending-work-sensor.

What other languages have you been using most?

RXML/Pike, Python, PHP

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I'm still a bit hazy on the conditions system, but am able to crank out software that works, and have built some possibly-useful-to-others libraries. I'm currently writing an online classroom system in Common Lisp.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I love it! I'm all about reducing typing, and Lisp has enabled me to do that incredibly well. It's also true that solutions in Lisp take somewhat longer to design than solutions in Python, but this is mostly because it's so easy to throw in a little more functionality in Lisp.

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Switch Date 2004

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Seek and Ye Shall Find | RtL Paul Graham | RtL Language Curiosity | RtL Eric Raymond