I, Stephane Belmon, 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?

Sometime in 2005, and Common Lisp.

What led you to try Lisp?

Probably a link from reddit; I stumbled upon the Abelson/Sussman videos taped for HP in 1986 and watched them all. Then I bought Peter Seibel's book and played with CMUCL/Slime, following along. So, it would have to be CL via Scheme I guess.

What other languages have you been using most?

C (too well), C++ (loved it at one point, I can hardly believe it now), the Bourne shell (+sed/grep/awk/etc.), Make (goal-directed! It's Prolog!). Got into Emacs Lisp a bit.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

I drank the KoolAid, no question about it -- I Believe in defmacro. I might even think that call/cc could have been insanely useful in past projects, to do something like SeaSide does, but for UI widgets.

But I'm still stuck on the "make use of it" part. The two reasons are (a) the enormous gap between my knowledge of C and sh/awk/sed/grep/... and that of Lisp (I know, I know, I just need to bite the bullet); (b) my field of work (embedded) isn't exactly teeming with eager souls.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

As the quote goes, it's the greatest (family of) language(s), no doubt; resistance is futile, (if (> x lisp) (defmacro x-in-lisp ...)). Well, assuming the language can be parsed, i.e. not Perl ;-)

My work is deeply embedded (ARM7, a few hundred KB). I find myself arguing that function pointers are OK to folks who did 8051 assembly a few years before. So not the most conducive of environments.

I lived through Greenspun's tenth rule, writing an XML-to-C code generator for an embedded UI runtime; now, I would write or port a small interpreter, write the UI framework as a bunch of macros generating macros, and get fired in the process ;-)

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Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: Switch Date 2005

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