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Lisping at JPL (2002)


This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL.

Tooth was only the second robot to do an indoor object-collection task, the other being Herbert, which was developed a year or two earlier in by Jonathan Connell working in Rod Brooks's mobot lab at MIT. The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1(DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. My job today (I am now working on software verification and validation) is to solve problems that can be traced directly back to the use of purely imperative langauges with poorly defined semantics like C and C++.

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