Average Lisp age?

[Owain]

Im 15, but I’m not arrogant like most young would-be programmers.

[Mikeb]

28. Started programming about a year ago, for a personal project, learned Ruby and OCaml, but then started on Clojure.

Now I'm using Common Lisp (SBCL) and loving it.

[GengyangCai]

Im 32 ... just started learning Lisp. Reading Paul Graham's Ansi Common Lisp ... but is pretty tough

[gekkonier]

Hi!
I'm 37 and am a hobby programmer.

I sh*t you not, but this got me onto the lisp train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc while surfing for no reason.
After that I googled around and found Racket, what I use since about a year for inhouse scripting.

Now I'm diving into common lisp. Therefore I'm learning Emacs too, because of reasons.

It's fun! I like! And I annoy everyone around me with my enthusiasm

[invlpg]

Hi everyone. I'm 17...

My functional programming story started with learning Haskell just over a year ago. Initially, I found wrapping my head around functional programming concepts insanely difficult... but, one day, it all just sort of clicked, and everything fell into place, and it has sort of become a natural way of thinking about programming now. Every time I go back to an imperative language, I think about how much easier it would be to implement the same thing in a functional language.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, I decided to step up to learning a Lisp dialect, as I had heard much lore about it being "God's chosen language" and whatever. I decided to learn Clojure.

It really gave me a new perspective. It made me see Haskell more like baby's first functional programming language, rather than seeing it as some complicated language that not many people would understand - it seemed both lacking in power, but also unnecessarily complex (especially in its dense syntax) compared to Lisp.

I am only now just starting to learn Common Lisp (SBCL), but if it weren't for my initial venture in learning Clojure, I wouldn't have discovered the joy that is writing Lisp in Emacs, and I would have remained a firm Vim believer.

[HerbM]

Next month (Jul 2017) is my 65th birthday, and since age 28 I have had an unrequited love affair with Lisp.

Never had the chance to do any significant Lisp professionally, but have continuously returned to studying and wanting to learn it well.

It was always my opinion the Lisp programmers were "just plain smarter" (on average) than most other programmers and I want to be one of them when I grow up.

Recently my interests turned seriously to Functional Programming which the Lisp community has been doing since before the Moon landing.

Perhaps it is really the Functional Programmers who are smarter, but I still want to be one of those people is (when I grow up.)

[ochappel]

Hi Folks,
I guess I'm the gray beard in the crowd. I just turned 70. I started programming in LISP at the age of 40 when I worked on a combat simulation for the U.S. Army's TRADOC Analysis Command. The simulation was called Eagle and was the first ever effort to create an object-oriented combat simulation that used AI (primarily rules and pattern matching) to simulate command and control. My job was to implement the fire support module. As I recall, I worked on a Symbolics 3650. What a great experience. I was the first modeler to ever implement mortar fires in an army simulation.

I stopped using LISP for several years because I was in a situation where Java was the primary focus but the principles of the object-oriented approach still applied so I was quite comfortable modeling and designing solutions.

Then I got the opportunity to create a sales and distribution planning system for the baking company. I built the system using LispWorks. The system performed statistical analysis of sales and returns for each week of the previous year determine sales and return history for each product for each of 63,000 points of sale. It then used a 12 week moving time series to calculate trend sales and returns. I used fuzzy logic to represent sales and returns for the week in history and for the trend. I applied Chebyshev's theorem to establish the fuzzy terms (HIGH, ABOVE-AVERAGE, AVERAGE, BELOW-AVERAGE, LOW) used to describe sales level and return level in the facts and rules. A set of 16 rules would create the plan. A time series analysis would forecast the total sales for each POS and a second set of approximately 16 rules would optimize the plan.
The final solution generated a huge ROI for the client, more than doubling their sales while cutting returns (waste) significantly.

A friend of mine later demonstrated the system at Java One using modified source data, changing from baked goods to beer. It was cool because all he had to do was to change the product descriptions and the POS names, all the underlying data remained the same and a fictitious beer sales and distribution plan was created.

Now I just tinker with CLOS and want to start doing some graphics work.