Lisping at JPL

a year ago

The rise and fall of Lisp at JPL, as told from a personal perspective.
Mars Rover Sample Return (MRSR) was a big mission with a rover weighing nearly a ton and a budget in the billions.
David Miller proposed using small rovers, a radical idea in 1988, leading to the creation of Tooth, a small robot.
Tooth and Robby were programmed in Lisp, with Robby running Lisp on-board and Tooth using a custom Lisp compiler.
The Rocky series of rovers, programmed in ALFA, led to the Sojourner rover on the Mars Pathfinder mission, which was programmed in C.
The Remote Agent software, running on Harlequin Common Lisp, controlled Deep Space 1 for two days in 1999.
Lisp was eventually phased out at JPL due to political and practical reasons, including integration issues and management decisions.
The author's attempts to reintroduce Lisp at Google were unsuccessful, leading to his return to JPL.
The author criticizes the interchangeable component model of software engineering and the dominance of languages like Java.
The demise of Lisp at JPL was partly due to the unreliability of a C program used for interprocess communication.

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