[flavoie]

notes at the end : """ [3] This begs the question of why he said this. The reason he gave at the time was that most of his time was being taken up dealing with multi-language integration issues. However, this was belied by the following fact: shortly before the review, I met with the integration engineer and offered to help him with any Lisp-related issues he was encountering. He replied that there weren't any that I could help with. So while there were issues that arose from the fact that Lisp had to interoperate with C, I do not believe that a good-faith effort was made to address those issues.

Postscript: Many of the multi-language integration headaches were caused by the interprocess communication system that allowed Lisp and C to communicate. The IPC relied on a central server (written in C) which crashed regularly. Getting rid of Lisp did in fact alleviate those problems (because the unreliable IPC was no longer necessary). It is nonetheless supremely ironic that the demise of Lisp at JPL was ultimately due in no small measure to the unreliability of a C program. """