[PeterStuer]

"And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."

I was from the same "Nouvelle AI"/Robotics cohort as Leslie Kaelbling. Autonomous Robotics in AI back then was a fairly small community, so everyone (at least in the nato and friends) knew each other from conferences and workshops.

Having written kernel and interface libraries for those type of robot systems in those days, it was not that much work that it would need to be an issue determining language choice.

My uninformed guess based on what lived in the community at the time would be that the teachings were so focussed on the ideas of physical grounding, control paradigms and systems, "the world is its own best model" and reaction against the symbolic reasoning systems that came before, that Scheme/Lisp had to go because it was an icon of the symbolic paradigm, and that in the new 'subsymbolic' world we did not pay attention to the programming language at all, because basically it was all data/signal flow and intercoupled and layered differential equations from sensors to actuators anyways.

[rurban]

But the industry standard in those times (and still) is to use the graphical-only world of Matlab Simulink, so you cannot make any syntax, type and API errors. Thanksfully MIT decided against that.

[wiz21c]

"it was all data/signal flow and intercoupled and layered differential equations from sensors to actuators anyways."

And the you need a pure CS dude like me to turn that into readable, maintainable, efficient code.

(I work with these guys who just see the differential equations... Leave them a few years on their own and they produce a huge pile of code and then wonder why none of the students use it :-)

(it's just my own experience, and although I'm a bit cynical here, I like that job and these guys a lot, we learn a lot from each other)