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?

Common lisp sometime in early 2003.

I installed openmcl and clisp at about the same time. I use openmcl more since it runs faster for most things.

What led you to try Lisp?

A combination of Kent Pitman's Slashdot interview and Norvig's Python/Lisp comparison.

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've been frustrated with C for a while and C++ and Java never really seemed to help much. I tried Python and really liked it, but found it really slow for a lot of things.

I tried Ocaml looking for something faster than Python. I liked Ocaml, but was somewhat frustrated by having to write different functions to treat ints and floats.

Then I tried Lisp and found it to have the best parts of Python but fast.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)

Uhh, not so far. Still need to look up a lot of commands in the Hyperspec before using them and I feel that there is a lot of functionality that I am unaware of.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I like it a lot. Very flexible and fast. My only complaint is that there is a lot of functionality external to the standard that a newcomer has to go out and find. Like regular expression, string splitting, threads, FFI. There are good packages for all these, but they don't come "out of the box" or arn't standardized.

I really like the idea of series. I wish they were part of the standard....