The lazy reader's best index to The Road to Lisp Survey, just one of several taxonomies found on The RtLS All-Kenny Page.

"Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining." Paul Graham's Road to Lisp

"Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition." Christian Lynbechs Road to Lisp

"That point of view lasted for maybe two weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." Constantine Vetoshev

"The next few weeks involved everyone taking turns running to each others' desk to show them neat new features we'd just discovered, and I have never looked back." Kenny Tilton's Road to Lisp

"It gets better every day." Scott McIntire

"the desperate search for Something Better is gone" Thomas F Burdick's Road to Lisp

"I'm continually amazed by how many things the language's designers got right." Peter Seibel's Road to Lisp

"I regret not having come to it sooner" Steven Harris' Road to Lisp

"Dogs bollocks!" Nikodemus Siivola'a Road to Lisp

"The final language." Peter Van Eynde's Road to Lisp

"Lisp encompasses all ideas in programming, both actual and potential." Erann Gat's Road to Lisp

"Prolog and then Lisp made me see there is much more in the programming languages field than I thought before." Ivan Toshkov's Road To Lisp

"Truly the best language" Reini Urban

"I never expected that Common Lisp would be /that/ much better." Erik Enge's Road to Lisp

"The first time I encountered Lisp, I immediately realized this was it." Sebastian Stern's Road to Lisp

"Lisp rulez" Eduardo Muñoz

"It's fantastic. Seems to be getting better every day and the community is really taking off." MarkBrady

"There had to be a better way, and then I was introduced to Lisp...a programmer's koan." Bill Birch's Road to Lisp

"It's like one of the Kung Fu monasteries in old Shaw Brothers' movies." Michael Naunton's Road to Lisp

"The flexibility in all dimensions at times overwhelms me" Tage Stabell-Kulø

"If I were dropped on a desert island and told that I could have only one programming language to play with it would be Common Lisp" Dave Pearson

"Emacs took me to elisp, elisp took me to scheme, scheme took me to common lisp. Common Lisp has taken me everywhere." Marco Baringer's Road to Lisp

"The Quality with No Name" Tayssir John Gabbour's Road to Lisp

"If I find a better language, I'll let you know." Donald Fisk's Road to Lisp

"Where they're going, we've already been, and that's a point that needs to be conveyed loudly and clearly to people who are interested in keeping current in their knowledge of programming paradigms." Brian Mastenbrook - Road to Lisp

"I'm amazed at how many of the features of CL are just now appearing in more "modern" languages." Gary Klimowicz's Road to Lisp

"I find it amusing to see all the "new ideas" in other languages that my Old Lisp Fart-dom allows me to chortle at." Bob Bechtel

"I find it interesting to consider that other languages' feature sets have tended more towards the Lispy as time has gone on" Karl K.'s Road to Lisp

"Malleable. Powerful. It carries with it a lot of history that gives perspective on the fad-ish tendencies of computer science today." Myron Wu's Road to LISP

"It struck me as funny that some of the proposed "future" features for Java had already been done in lisp decades ago." Peter Santoro

"Lisp is the cockroach of programming languages: it'll be the only one left after the apocalypse." Paul Snively

"Most language features I have ever seen are already in Lisp." Bill Birch's Road to Lisp

"I wanted to have fun programming again." Larry Clapp's Road to Lisp

"I could not see elsewhere something as intriguing as Common Lisp." Nicolas Sceaux's Road to Lisp

" It's the most fun and promising language I've used since (dare I say it) Perl." GeoffCant

"It makes my work so much more interesting, fun and productive than any other computer language I've experienced." Gary King's Road to Lisp

"I love writing in Lisp, it made programming fun again." Jock Cooper

"No other language has caused me to laugh out loud... from sheer delight." Chris Sonnack's Road to Lisp

"Normally programming isn't 'fun' for me, but this has changed with Common Lisp." Bruce Woodward's Road to Lisp

"I'm having fun writing software in CL." Thomas Stenhaug's Road to Lisp

"It is quite exhilarating." Lars Wirzenius

"Programming is fun again." The Road Jeff Caldwell Took

"It made me remember what a joy Lisp languages are to use" William Bland

"Greatest thing so far, it gave me back the fun of programming." Thomas Müller

"It's been a while since something grabbed my interest quite so much." DARose

"Lisp truly has re-awakened the excitement I had about computers when I first entered this field." Doug Tolton's Road to Lisp

"It's a good thing to come home to of an evening." TimHaynes

"Loved the parenthesis - simply beautiful." Abhijit Rao

"there was something really wonderful and better here." AlexPeake

"They were an epiphany, and showed me how beautiful Lisp really was." William Maddox

"Scheme was a lovely sweet-spot in language design" David Rush

"Lisp seemed very odd by comparison, but I soon realized just how elegant it was." Drew McDermott

"What made Lisp stand out for me was its beauty and clarity compared to the other languages I knew, probably because I'm a mathematician." Edi Weitz' Road to Lisp

"For several years, I have considered that Lisp syntax was regular and elegant, and that, as a Mathematician, I would love it if I give it a try." C E C Artime

"To me, the concepts that Lisp stands for are an embodiment of all that is beautiful in the Universe." Sebastian Stern's Road to Lisp

"And it's so pretty!" Joshua Eckroth

"The syntax and theoretical power are truly astounding." Justin Dubs

"Interesting. Broad. Powerful." AlexTibbles

"what I can implement is restricted by my abilities rather than the language" Tage Stabell-Kulø

"I think over the years I finally understood, what all the chapters in CLtL are about." RtLMartinGinkel

"I think it is one of the most mature, flexible, powerful and precise languages." Marc Mertens's Road to Lisp

"very expressive and closer to my way of thinking than Pascal and Fortran and C...The best language I know of." Andrew Philpot's Road to Lisp

"I feel like incredible power is available at my fingertips. " Ralph Richard Cook

"Lisp has found it's way into my mind." tony yelacic

"The translation from concepts and ideas in my head to Lisp code is almost a direct flow" Erik Winkels's Road to Lisp

"I simply found, after a while, that I thought in Lisp." Mikel Evins' Road to Lisp

" I have a C assignment for Uni, and I can't think properly, so I'm writing a first-shot in Lisp and then I'll convert it into C." Tristan Alexander McLeay's Road to Lisp

"Love it. It fits in my head, and has changed the way I think about programming." Mark Triggs

" It gives me the freedom to concentrate on the problem, rather than the language representation." Joel Ray Holveck

"Everything I tried before Lisp seemed to hinder either my thinking about or executing solutions to problems." Vladimir Sedach

"It's a wonderful language for thinking clearly about computation, computability and programming languages generally." Mark Wilson

"I like the idea of having a programming language that I can experiment in quickly yet still has good run time speed." Bruce Durling's Road to Lisp

"Lisp is simply great for implementing stuff you dont know how to implement. " Martin Mikelsons

"once you see closures...you don't want to go back!" Artie Gold's Road to LISP

"Once you've known garbage collection other dynamic features, it's hard to go back." Peter Housel's Road to Lisp

"best thing is the confidence it gives in that it can absorb a large amount of change" Gabor Melis's Road to Lisp

"And, of course, execution speed! Vroom vroom." Thomas Stenhaug's Road to Lisp

"I do use it occasionally at work, when I don't think anyone else will notice or when I really need its power for something." Gareth McCaughan's Road to Lisp

"definitely the best tool for anything that is not pure bit-twiddling." Pekka P Pirinen

"the language itself is very clean, without lots of special cases, etc, making it easy to learn and use." PaulKhuong's Road To Lisp

"CompileLinkRun and static typing (ie. C,C++, Java) leaves a bad taste in my mouth." BradMight

"Cool. Terse. Small (compared to the Java APIs I'm used to). Hackable." Pete Kirkham

"Then I tried Lisp and found it to have the best parts of Python but fast." Robbie Sedgewick's Road to Lisp

"Add macros (see On Lisp) to the puzzle, and you never want to go back to another language again." Pascal Costanza's Road To Lisp

"I'm taken by the idea of a language being its own metalanguage and scripting language" Damien Sullivan's Road to Lisp

"Lisp macros and the metaprogramming paradigm is very powerful, and nothing does it better than Lisp" William Maddox

"Macros are unbelievably powerful." Nonya B's Road to Lisp

"As I get more experience as a programmer, I constantly find myself trying to code in a more "meta" way." Gordon Weakliem

"It's the macros, of course." John Pallister's road to Lisp

" This annoyed me so much that it made me want to learn Lisp seriously, just to see who of us is really wrong." Pascal Costanza's Road To Lisp

"I still had a feeling I was missing out on something" Lars Brinkhoff's Road to Lisp

"At this point it struck me that my image of Lisp (cute functional language with more parentheses than practical potential) must be rather flawed." Jacek Generowicz

"While reading ruby-talk and other ruby-stuff I kept coming across references to Scheme and Lisp" Grzegorz Chrupala

"I saw the kind of sophisticated applications at BBN that Ken Anderson, Renu Bostwick and Rusty Bobrow built with JScheme" GeoffKnauth

"a large number of hackers I admire use Lisp" GeoffCant

"after hearing all the great things about lisp I decided to dive in and learn for myself. I've heard a lot of negative comments too, but never from anyone who actually used lisp" Brendan Van Horn

"the second thought was "why the h@ll did they write [Mirai, 3D modeling/animation software] in lisp?" I left that question unanswered for quite a while because my head was swimming with most of the common misconceptions of Lisp." Charlie McMackin

"I was convinced I could at least come close to the same productivity as Peter using C++. I was seriously mistaken. You can see the results for yourself here." Brandon Corfman

"understanding why it is such a perfect family of languages requires intense study and is very, very difficult to articulate even to other programmers who have decades of experience under their belt." Conrad Barski

"I lurk on c.l.l and enjoy reading the "advocacy" posts just as much as the technical ones." Chris Van Dusen

"The only downside is persuading others that it is OK to use it." John Williams