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I used to work on flight software for a private company. It seemed like inertia from "heritage" always drove lots of decisions. From my memory, I remember quality assurance from NASA getting hung up on the following items during design reviews:

1) an RTOS they weren't familiar with

2) a language they weren't familiar with (the familiar set was Ada, C, C++)

3) dynamic memory allocation

How much push back did you get from quality assurance?

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Lisp was not the RTOS, it was a process running under the RTOS (vxWorks). Nonetheless, we did use a Lisp with a hard-real-time GC. That helped allay some of the dynamic memory allocation FUD.

We got a ton of pushback about the unfamiliar language, but Lisp eventually won out because back then there really was no viable alternative. They actually tried to port the code to C++ and failed (running afoul of Greenspun's tenth and the immaturity of C++ compilers of the day).

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