I, Toby Davies, 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?
April 2007 was my first encounter with common lisp, i also nearly re-invented the wheel about 4 days beforehand (as per greenspun's 10th rule) by designing and nearly writing an interpreter for something more or less like scheme
What led you to try Lisp?
The first lisp i thought about came to me in a dream... well, i'm sure i had seen SOMETHING about lisp prior to said dream, because i sincerely doubt i could have cooked up the idea for a beautiful, nearly syntaxless, more or less functional language with an eval function so i could use code to write code, without first reading something about lisp. So there i was all ready to write my interpreter in C++ when i stumble apon Beating the Averages (I was intending to use the language for my internet startup that may eventually end up here, that's why i stumbled upon it) and decided to have a look at lisp. having a look through the dialects for whatever reason i decided upon Common Lisp and got me a version of SBCL, Emacs (i was a vi man before, but i have been reformed), and SLIME and got coding, within a week i'd written my first multi-threaded app, having never looked at threads before and am building an application stack to put on top of mod_lisp (it probably already exists, but it's still a good learning experience)
What other languages have you been using most?
Prior to Lisp i was a bit of a Python fan, but the whole pass-by-reference thing confused me to the point that i was a little irritated (which is why i went off looking for an alternative) prior to that i dabbled a little in Perl, did a fair bit in C++, and did a couple of uni courses in C and Haskel. I did a bit of VBA when i was in secondary school, and that is the entirety of my programming experience... it does confuse me as to why Python was ever writen, it looks like greenspun's 10th taken to the extreme... a DSL for programs that need a slow implementation of half of common lisp... that said the interpreter and list comprehention mean i still use it for little things cause it's 100 times nicer than writing a shell script.
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
hard to quantfy is a bit of an understatement... i'm about a month into it, and i'm getting to the end of that irritating period when you want to do non-trivial things with a language but you just don't know what all the functions are called so you feel painfully impotent and incapable of even the simplest of tasks... I've found that this period is extended in lisp becase there is no syntax learning curve, so you want to do non-trivial things straight away, but there are a hell of a lot of functions (and they use all these natural-looking characters in them like hypens that computers ought to interpret and do something with damnit! [you can tell i'm a reformed C programmer!])
What do you think of Lisp so far?
It is a beautiful language. Lexical Scoping is the most fantastic idea known to man (or 'me' if not 'man'). I love the development of languages through macros and functions (and combinations thereof) that can be re-used to whatever end necessary.
