Hi all,
nice to read this reach-out thread on an otherwise rather silent list!
Here's my contribution.
Like some of you, I work in the academy with Lisp, which is not always easy, but always gratifying. As a professor of computer science, I have the opportunity to use it in two courses: one on functional programming (along with Haskell) and another one on OO, which is also a good way to show some MOP to young students ;-) I don't think there are many places left in France where undergrads see some Lisp, so I struggle to maintain that.
I came to CL around 2006, which is rather late in my career, but something I rarely related is how I came to Lisp (as a family of dialects). Back in the early 90s, as an undergraduate, I had a course on neural nets and a 3 hours practical session in which we had to implement one for character recognition on 32x32 B/W images IIRC. I believe we had to to it in some version of Scheme and this was my first encounter with the language. Later on, during my PhD, I worked on cognitive science and virtual reality, and I developed an application in C with OpenGL, for which I felt the need to add a scripting language for easy customization. The little memory I had of Scheme made me turn to Guile, which, at the time, was quite easy to interface with C. At the same time, I became involved in XEmacs and eventually became one of the core maintainers for several years.
The funny thing is that those experiences didn't really trigger a vocation; merely some interest. Probably because I just hadn't thought the whole thing through, I still continued to program in C for various things. Until I started to write Clon (my command-line options management library), at least the early version, in C. There, I vividly remember getting more and more annoyed by the day, having to deal with low-level stuff (such as memory management) by hand. And I started wondering why I was still using that language, in spite of being completely free of my own choices. Then, I sort of suddenly remembered I liked Lisp, grabbed Graham's book on CL, and started rewriting Clon in Lisp. That was my first involvement with the language...
Retrospectively, I'm still puzzled that it took me so long so acknowledge... my own taste. It's like Lisp was always there, in the back of my head, but I just hadn't realized it. Funny how things work.
Stay safe!