Richard P. Gabriel is musician, poet, and respected Lisp hacker. Probably generally best known for coining the phrase “worse is better“ with his essays on why Unix and C prevailed over superior alternatives, he’s also the author of several books including Innovation Happens Elsewhere (with Ron Goldman).

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading his various works from the past couple decades, and recently stumbled across a particularly relevant essay of his that I want to share. It’s called Lessons From The Science of Nothing At All, and begins poetically enough: “Where I come from we make things from nothing – from dreams and fantasies.”

I, Arto Bendiken, 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?

I read Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp and Paul Graham’s On Lisp sometime in mid-2005 or thereabouts. Both proved to be useful introductions to Common Lisp and gave me an initial appreciation of the unique characteristics of Lisp-derived programming languages.

After being sufficiently enlightened by those two books, I moved onward to Scheme. This came about primarily as a result of struggling my way through the Wizard Book and watching the 6.001 video lectures, as well as perusing various online tutorials and papers. I’ve been programming in Scheme ever since, with the occasional foray into Common Lisp.