[Zak]

Shortly after my parents bought a new Macintosh, I found a program on it called Hypercard. It was a RAD tool that included a scripting language with flexible, English-like (verbose!) syntax. I starting digging around in the source code of the demo apps, and it kind of snowballed from there.

I took quite a while off after being taught that "real programming" meant C or C++ ,and later Java. The thought of trying to write interesting applications in those languages was unappealing. I discovered PHP when I needed server-side processing on a web page, but didn't find it very satisfying.

A few years ago, I heard that some guy had created a spam filter that actually worked. I read some other articles on his site, and he kept talking about a programming language called Lisp. I had heard of it, but thought it was dead. I decided to give it a try, and I haven't turned back since.