This article appears on HN on a regular basis, so I thought people might be interested in a bit of historical trivia: the reason this article is called "Lisp as an Alternative to Java" instead of some other language is that it cribbed the title off my original study (http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf). The reason that article was titled the way it was is that I was working at JPL at the time and there was a software crisis underway. To that point, spacecraft had been mostly programmed in assembly language. The then-recently-launched Cassini spacecraft was a notable exception, having been programmed in Ada. But it was becoming clear that neither of these approaches scaled well, and so the hunt was on for an alternative. Java was the hot new language at the time, and it was under serious consideration to become the new standard for spacecraft coding. But Java was new and immature (and, in those days, very very slow), and I was advocating to use Common Lisp instead. That study was conducted -- and the paper was titled -- in order to bolster my case.

Ultimately, Common Lisp flew on a spacecraft once, on the New Millennium DS1 mission. Unfortunately, there was a serious political shitstorm that accompanied that mission, and Lisp never flew again despite several million dollars having been spent to show it to be a viable approach. :-(