Hello all ! I came to lisp through the Free Software door, slightly more than two years ago, just after having ominously declared to a co-worker (discussing emacs config files) that I would *never* get used to such an old-fashioned language and its silly parenthesis ! Somehow this naive declaration triggered me into having a closer look at it :)
I've also been around (I mean : reading your docs, blogs, postings, ...) for about the same time, though I've been quite silent, preferring to tackle my problems alone, and occasionally sending a mail to the author of this or that project, asking for advice or submitting a patch. This isn't the most efficient way to learn, granted, but I'm more of the RTFM and self-taught type and as someone said earlier : there wasn't really such a thing as a lisp community... until now :) I play with lisp on free time only : so far, I've been working a couple of times as a computer scientist (programming in C) and in a series of jobs completely unrelated to CS. My only real "exposure" to other lispers was at the 2004 edition of the libre software meeting in Bordeaux (where I live). At that time, I was really new to lisp and getting more and more frustrated by some of the issues that led to the creation of this list. But the guys I met there [1] ! Just seeing how they were using their lisp, and how productive they seemed to be, renewed my interest in lisp :) Since then, I went on practicing lisp, experimenting a lot of project ideas for the sake of learning this or that aspect of lisp. As of today, I don't consider myself as a newbie anymore, but I realize I still have a long way to go : in short, I think I'm at an intermediate level :) I started a not-so-pet project (a gtd web app, using LoL and UCW) but I put it on hold recently in order to achieve another one, on which it depends : bringing at least an hint of some order into my Real Life, so that I can have enough free time (and credibility, too) to finish and use this app :) As for the frustrating aspects of lisp : I sincerely hope that we can do something about this and until I can have more free time, I'm quite sure that I will be able to handle some non-coding issues (most notably this wiki-gardening stuff that has been bugging me, too). I spent the most part of this morning reading this mailing list. Duh ! I may be optimistic, but if you still have half the energy and motivation you had when writing these posts, I think we're in for a great change (btw : all hail Peter ! :) As for my ideas and suggestions, I'm preparing a second email : this one is already longer than I intended (in short : how about some kind of a bug tracking system to have some visibility of our progress ?). [1] Attendees at http://www.cliki.net/Libre%20Software%20Meeting%202004 -- Pierre-François
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