Lisping at JPL

Summary

Lisping at JPL Copyright (c) 2002 by Ron Garret (f.k.a. Erann Gat), all rights reserved. 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. (This will become rather obvious shortly.) 1988-1991 - The Robotics Years I came to JPL in 1988 to work in the Artificial Intelligence group on autonomous mobile robots. Times were different then. Dollars flowed more freely from government coffers. AI Winter was just beginning, and it had not yet arrived at JPL. (Technology at the Lab tends to run a few years behind the state of the art :-) JPL at the time was in the early planning stages for a Mars rover mission called Mars Rover Sample Return (MRSR). In those days space missions were Big, with a capital B. The MRSR rover was to weigh nearly a ton. The mission budget was going to be in the billions of dollars (which was typical in those days). Against this backdrop I went to work for a fellow named David Miller, who also happened to be my thesis advisor. Dave had the then-radical idea of using small rovers to explore planets instead of big ones. In 1988 that was a tough sell. Very few people believed that a small rover could do anything useful. (Many still don't.) Using some creatively acquired R&D funding, Dave hired Colin Angle (then a grad student working for Rod Brooks at MIT, now CEO of IS Robotics) as a summer student. Colin built a small robot named Tooth, which stood in very stark contrast to the 2000-pound Robby, which was the testbed for the MRSR mission. At the time it was more or less taken for granted that AI work was done in Lisp. C++ barely existed. Perl was brand new. Java was years away. Spacecraft were mostly programmed in assembler, or, if you were really being radical, Ada. Robby had two Motorola 68020 processors running vxWorks, each with (if memory se...