Coming to Lisp
Sunday, April 25, 2004
When (and why) do people decide to "come to Lisp"? This is a hard
question to answer because there is very little in the way of
demographic information about Lisp users. Kenny Tilton kicked off a
survey a while back that tried to answer this. In fact, Kenny
assembled a breakdown of the key drivers that led people to Lisp. Unfortunately, Kenny's Road to Lisp Survey
questions asked "when" (what year) people tried Lisp seriously for the first
time, but did not ask "at what age" they first tried Lisp. Reading
the
Young Lispers page on
CLiki, it is easy to come to the conclusion that all of the "new
blood" that is coming to Lisp consists of twenty-somethings. However,
there is a different demographic group that is also coming to
Lisp. This group consists of veteran programmers who have come to
Lisp as a result of dissatisfaction with other programming
languages. People who have experienced all of the Java-like hype
before and who see it for what it really is.
Based on a
thread on comp.lang.lisp, it appears that a lot of c.l.l. regulars learned Lisp relatively late in their programming
careers, many as a result of dissatisfaction with other programming languages:
- Duane Rettig: 31
- Edi Weitz: 35
- Mikel Evins: 28
- Bill Bland: 28
- Espen Vestre: 27
- Michael Sullivan: 35
- Kaz Kylheku: 30
- Marc Spitzer: 33
- Gary Klimowicz: 46
- David Thompson: 45
- John Thingstad: 31
- Rob Warnock: 56
