The Rise and Fall of Lisp at JPL: A Story of AI and Politics

This article recounts the rise and fall of the Lisp programming language at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In the late 1980s, Lisp shone in JPL's robotics projects, successfully used in several robotic missions, including the Sojourner rover on the Mars Pathfinder mission (though Sojourner ultimately used C). However, due to political infighting and the blind pursuit of "industry best practices" (namely C++), Lisp was gradually marginalized at JPL and eventually abandoned, a tragedy in the author's view. The author argues that Lisp's elegance and expressive power made it particularly well-suited for JPL's one-of-a-kind, highly dynamic projects, and this decision resulted in a waste of valuable resources.