The Road to Lisp Questions I, flip phillips style Person, 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?
1982, some strange interpreter that ran on one of the machines at the Engineering Graphics lab at Ohio State. I have absolutely no idea what it was.
What led you to try Lisp?
Arun Welch started talking about Chandra and parenthesees. From there I was simply a cult convert.
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?
I was just learning C at the time too, teaching Fortran. I liked the procedural languages, but was curious about the functional things going on. (other languages tried at the time, Forth on the Mac 128, which was painful).
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? (I know, that is hard to measure)
Before common lisp I was starting to get a bid discouraged by all the various varieties, unstandardized and all. When I went to the 'real world' to work (ok Pixar isn't quite the real world) in '87 my use dropped off substantially. I even remeber back when someone embeded xlisp (initially without permission...) into autocad and my brother-in-law got so excited he wrote a book about it! Back in grad school I was happy to see Scheme (a bunch of us led by Steve May created an animation language, al, based on Scheme) and Dylan (Straz helped out there...) and the more robust versions appearing on the Mac. I ended up using a lot of Mathematica, which can be used lisp style, and drifted off again, but now am back to using it again regularly.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Well, at least it runs on my PowerBook now, and it has OpenGL bindings :)
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