When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
Some time around 1998ish, and I started with emacs lisp.
What led you to try Lisp?
There was a thread on uk.comp.os.linux concerning (deprecating) exploiting the short-circuitedness of the "&&" operator in bash, where lisp was introduced into the discussion. From that, and a switch to using emacs as primary editor of choice, lisp started to pique my interest.
Where did your road originate?
I'd banged-around Pascal and C at school, ML at university, self-taught Perl afterwards, didn't want to follow the herd stampeding down the python route at the time. I'm still looking for perfection, and other languages happen both at work and at play, but in the meantime Scheme is keeping me happy.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I've flitted back and forth between librep, elisp, CL (rarely -I can't be seen to be taking a certain friend's advice!!) and spent most of my time with Scheme. Flavour of the month is Bigloo. I don't write that much in it; there are some web-CGIs I've done (including a replacement for a tiny subset of HTML tags that allows me to program documents very quickly), and a crude music synthesizer project that's currently highly in development.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
It's a great thing. Functional programming is appealing; the consistency and simplicity of syntax (notably not at the expense of possible concepts) is wonderful. It's a good thing to come home to of an evening.
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