"My job today is to solve problems that can be traced directly back to the use of purely imperative languages with poorly defined semantics like C and C++...
Postscript: Many of the multi-language integration headaches were caused by the interprocess communication system that allowed Lisp and C to communicate. The IPC relied on a central server (written in C) which crashed regularly. Getting rid of Lisp did in fact alleviate those problems (because the unreliable IPC was no longer necessary). It is nonetheless supremely ironic that the demise of Lisp at JPL was ultimately due in no small measure to the unreliability of a C program."