Thomas Stenhaug's Road to Lisp
I, Thomas Stenhaug, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

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 in November 2001. Switch Date 2001

What led you to try Lisp?

The promises of

  • efficient, mature compilers
  • helpful development environments, like Emacs+ILISP/ELI LispWork's IDE
  • being able to first write code fast, and then make the code run fast, as needed
RtL Language Curiosity 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 the time I was programming in Python, and was mostly happy with it.

However, I was trying to do things at runtime that seemed so much easier with a CL-style toplevel and tools geared towards working that way. It also seemed interesting to be able to change the syntax to fit my abstractions. And, of course, execution speed! Vroom vroom.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure) While I'm able to write useful, fairly robust software, I still consider myself a newbie. I often find that I've been doing things backwards, and that I can save a lot of work by letting CL help me.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

It delivers, and I'm having fun writing software in CL.