I got into Common Lisp > 9 years ago with being exposed to it in academia, or really even from social/pop-culture influences. I was looking for a language that

I got into Common Lisp > 9 years ago with being exposed to it in academia, or really even from social/pop-culture influences. I was looking for a language that had relatively good performance that was easy to prototype code interactively for and Common Lisp + SLIME fit that need perfectly. From there I learned how easy it was to make your own Lisp and learned a lot about how programming languages work and had a lot fun with that for a while.