When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

My first attempt was probably PLISP for the Apple II. I've been attempting to learn LISP ever since. Then there was TI's PC Scheme - but never did much with that. When I got a Macintosh, PowerLisp was a natural addition; likewise, on my PalmPilot I've LispMe loaded for some time. It's always been a little here, and a little there - until now...

What led you to try Lisp?

I've always been interested in computer languages, and found LISP to be unlike anything else. I've always wanted (for years!) to seriously learn LISP, and now I've a project I'm working on - which seems to help me more than anything else. I learned C that way... and Palm programming...

What other languages have you been using most?

Currently, I write mostly in Korn Shell and Ruby. I used Perl quite a lot in the days of Perl 4, and have used C, Pascal, and FORTH quite a lot. FORTH is a favorite of mine, and it shares many of the benefits of LISP (most notably, rapid prototyping). To me, LISP seems like a high-level FORTH. ;-)

Now I'm attempting to use CLISP and SBCL - though I've also got OpenMCL loaded on my iBook (along with CLISP).

I'm also trying to learn Eiffel here and there (using SmartEiffel) - and Smalltalk is still on that list of Languages To Be Learnt.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?

Seems like LISP is advancing faster than I am.... I started with Winston & Horn's 1st Edition (MACLISP) and now with Winston & Horn's 3rd Edition (Common Lisp). I also have gone through the Little Schemer and the Little Lisper books.

Now I'm trying to work my way fully through Successful Lisp and On Lisp, and perhaps also A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation using Lisp.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I like it even more than before. The advent of Common Lisp and CLOS is forcing yet another shift in thinking. I'm still used to CAR and CDR and CADDR and so forth...

Araneida is fascinating - I'm using it for a web project I'm working on..

I've always been a little stuck in trying to learn Lisp, as the manuals would show how to add numbers, use macros, or even how to create a Lisp interpreter - but if you wanted to actually do something like scan text files, take user input, serve web pages, create a network socket - generally anything having to do with real world uses - it wasn't there. That's still the case, but perhaps the Common Lisp Cookbook will alleviate that somewhat.