It's called logistics.
It's a new world.
It happened.
It's been said that this single piece of software paid back for all DoD AI research.
If the software wasn't written in lisp, it would have been written in any other language.
And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead.
Did the software help? Probably. It's likely there would have been more screw ups if there was no software. But it takes a big leap to credit the software with winning the war.
It was based on a decade of research in various planning software written in Lisp.
> And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead.
How so? How should it work to move hundred thousands of people with hundreds of thousands different types of things between several continents? In a few months?
the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline
This is more than an elementary logical mistake on your part, this is pure crazy.
By the same logic all those COBOL and Java applications that are deployed for something major (from banking to taxation to multi-national logistics) prove that COBOL and Java are as good as Lisp (and irreplaceable at that, seeing that "there wasn't something else deployed in their place").
What app was used in ONE war doesn't matter at all to explain which language is better than another.
Lots of far more crucial operation than the logistics in a minor war held by a superpower to a small third world country, used other languages. For example, NASA missions used assembly and C.
Does that prove anything relate to the suitability of those languages in general?
Quit the BS Lisp-proselytisation with bogus arguments and hand-waiving.
> How should it work to move hundred thousands of people
> with hundreds of thousands different types of things
> between several continents? In a few months?
Either you're doing one epic troll or you're displaying a staggering ignorance of the ability for militaries going back to the time of the Roman Empire to do significant mobilizations.
That particular software could have been written in any bloody language. Logistics is one of the more boring areas of software engineering anyway -- and the majority of it in the world runs in Cobol, Java and similar boring languages, just like most of the banking world runs.
Plus, it's not like the US army haven't made a mess with war logistics. How much did the Iraq war cost to the country again?
You may want to read what the software actually did and how it was developed. That would clear things up a bit for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning...