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? Around April 2002, and it was Common Lisp.
What led you to try Lisp? I was browsing through Eric S. Raymond's "Jargon File" and found a bit where he said every programmer should learn Lisp "for that wonderful moment when you finally get it". It made me curious.
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? At that point the only other language I knew was Java, and didn't know enough about programming to be dissatisfied with it.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure) Probably not as far as I should be. It's sorta hard for me to find practical projects that don't have Issues that require using some other language, so I haven't had a great deal of incentive to work more on it. In case you're interested, these Issues are mainly the lack of free native-code compilers and graphics libraries for Windows.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
As a whole it's wonderful to write in, but there are certain parts that seem somewhat hairy and inconsistant. I'm in love with the debugger though.
Switch Date 2002 RtL Eric Raymond RtL Word of Mouth