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Of course similar stories, not involving Lisp, abound. So, this story does not, in the end, reveal any unique merit of Lisp, however fun it is as a story.



How many of those stories happened before the DS1, though? It's easy in hindsight to say that our new, non-Lisp system better have remote debugging at least as good as the DS1's. That suggests two (possible) unique merits of Lisp: a repl with the full language environment at one's disposal, as an out-of-the-box feature; and, well, being a trailblazer. :)


Name a few such stories, besides Erlang related.


I don't know of any space probes coded in Erlang.

But it would be hard to identify any long-lived space probe whose software was not updated after launch. There are famous stories about Mars rovers.


Updated, yes. Remotely debugged, no.


How do you suggest they determined what to put in the new version of the software? Rolled dice?


Local simulations, testing, etc. A REPL is much easier to connect than gdbstub when the link has 20 minute RTT.

Remote Agent was first for a) being able to be interactively debugged at remote b) actually exercising that, also c) IIRC it was already designed as basis to provide self-healing kind of ability to the system (or I might be confusing it with another lisp system from Ron Garret while he was at JPL)




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