Author here. This pops up on HN regularly, which I'm happy to see, but it's pretty dated at this point. Here is a more recent update:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited...

And, as always, AMA.

Related. Others?

Lisping at JPL Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557347 - Jan 2023 (100 comments)

The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524552 - Jan 2023 (145 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113434 - Aug 2021 (9 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087419 - Jan 2020 (307 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13626074 - Feb 2017 (37 comments)

Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989328 - July 2014 (19 comments)

The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 - Feb 2011 (36 comments)

The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304736 - Sept 2008 (72 comments)

> At the time it was more or less taken for granted that AI work was done in Lisp. C++ barely existed. Perl was brand new. Java was years away. Spacecraft were mostly programmed in assembler, or, if you were really being radical, Ada.

Given the choices, Lisp made a lot of sense when they started. After 2001-2004, there were other options - not to say they were necessarily better, but a mainstream language that enables a large number of people working together (interchangeably) has its value. Lisp is indeed "one-of-a-kind, highly dynamic applications that must be developed on extremely tight budgets and schedules" - but has a reputation for fostering lone geniuses and bad for large teams working together and maintaining legacy codebases.

(I write this as a big fan of Lisp.)

Tells one of my all-time favourite stories.

> 1994-1999 - Remote Agent

> Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.

While I was at Amazon, just before AWS, the entire internal network was monitored by a Lisp agent. I'm not sure if that is still true but it was kind of secret, and the internal wiki (only a few sentences) that documented its existence was removed with no deletion record.

Right before my position was outsourced to an entire remote overseas team, we had rolled out AAA* which conceivably cut out any unauthorized automated agents from the loop.

* https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-aaa-authentication-aut...

Version with some pictures here:

https://corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/

It's an interview I did with Ron Garrett about the history of Lisp at the JPL.

> The demise of Lisp at JPL is a tragedy. The language is particularly well suited for the kind of software development that is often done here

That is a shame, but this can be said about many languages of time past. Do schools even teach lisp these days ?

IMO, another casualty of our WEB only environment :(

Very tiny Lisp, Forths and some Pascal like at http://t3x.org

One of them whole numbers as lists. I saw no floats, but there are fractional numbers.

    (- '#2 '#3)
    => '#-1

Easy mode:

http://t3x.org/zsp/index.html

You are Alonzo Church reincarnated:

http://t3x.org/clc/code.html

>enginner >can't do anything with 128MB. In 2002.

In my country an Engineer with a Bachelor would implement a Forth in KB's in days by just reading the specs or books related to building one.

A Microlisp maybe in weeks.

Also, as a very tiny and minimal Lisp:

http://t3x.org/zsp/index.html

Easier than SICP for Scheme and Intro to Symbolic Computation for Common Lisp.

true Evergreen ...nostalgic memories of stories from old 20%-time-and-don-t-be-evil Google days. Sigh. I still hope AI takeoff somehow revives Lisp-as-a-human-friendly-computer-language or something in the vein of this.

Forth would be a good choice too. No GC, use 'forget'.