Lisping at JPL (2020)

For those interested, today we have a source which references some present companies that use CL in production. It is by no means an official one, we collect data when we find it, but it makes our answer to "who uses CL?" way better than only 2 years ago: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ Google (still, with ITA Software, people from Google contribute heavily to SBCL), Intel (for the Tofino programmable chip https://allegrograph.com/press_room/barefoot-networks-uses-f...), all quantum computing companies (the new AI?), Boeing, web companies (the new OSS app Screenshotbot), cloud providers (keepit), music products (the awesome ScoreCloud app), banks (russian Sberbank), financial analytics (Ravenpack), etc. Several of them are still hiring.

Also discussed countless times before - see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lisping%20at%20JPL&type=story&...

> Dave hired Colin Angle (then a grad student working for Rod Brooks at MIT, now CEO of IS Robotics) as a summer student

At the time this article was published, it looked like IS Robotics was primarily a defense/military robotics contractor. Very soon after they would've released their new line of home robotics and rebranded as iRobot.

Searching their career page / their SWE roles doesn't show much in the way of Lisp, but I recall people saying it used to power Roomba.

2020 or 2002?

> 1988-1991 - The Robotics Years

My dad was a project manager at JPL during this time and I was in jr high or high school. I remember visiting during a JPL Open House and seeing a Mac IIcx or IIcx (the smaller Mac II box) mounted on a small RC-car-sized rover-like chassis autonomously roaming the grounds. I suspect the author of this piece had a hand in that