Why Lisp?

In The Autodesk File by Autodesk founder John Walker has a chapter about why Lisp was selected for AutoCAD as the basis for AutoLISP. "Lisp is the preeminent language in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and has been for over two decades. Many of the most complicated programs ever written have been written in Lisp. Lisp is far from an esoteric toy of computer scientists: a system called NAVEX, written entirely in Lisp, will soon be ensuring that the Space Shuttle reaches the runway. Expert systems implemented in Lisp will be a central part of the Space Station environmental and energy management systems."

So it seems like it might be true what (newlisper) once was told. Below some fun comments from his post.

It was certainly fun to imagine Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin typing:
(setq course 'moon)
on a clunky keyboard while floating around inside the Command Module. Or perhaps Mike Collins could have radioed:
 "Houston, this is Columbia. We have a problem: unbalanced parentheses at line 1202."