> Politics mainly. And inertia. And the sunk cost fallacy.
I would say no, sort of, and maybe. I don't think I've ever seen a language chosen because of politics. For "inertia", I would say "conservatism" - people know that they can build systems (even safety critical ones) using C, and they know where the problems are. They don't know where the problems are using Lisp. And they don't want to take the time to learn Lisp - that's sunk cost, but whether it's a fallacy or not depends on whether Lisp really is more suited for such work than C. You assert that it is; many of us would like to see considerably more evidence before we agree.
What evidence? Maybe a few hundred hard real time systems successfully written in Lisp. (But how are we going to get them, if everybody defaults to C? I will grant you that there's a chicken-and-egg problem here...)
> > Is it because the entire profession is blind, and only you and a few enlightened ones realize how wonderful Lisp is?
> Yes. Pretty much.
Yeah... um... I think I'll just let your words speak for themselves.
I want to follow up that whole discussion by stating I really appreciate someone with actual experience in this area chiming in. NASA code attracts a huge amount of bikeshedding here.
All of it. (Except for an IPC system which was written in C. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ if you want to know the whole story.)
> Would you answer them?
I'll answer a few of them.
> if Lisp is so wonderful compared to C, how come so many more safety-critical systems are written in C?
Politics mainly. And inertia. And the sunk cost fallacy.
> Is it because the entire profession is blind, and only you and a few enlightened ones realize how wonderful Lisp is?
Yes. Pretty much.
> Or is it because people that have done this for decades see more problems with Lisp than you are aware of?
They, like you, think they see problems, but they, like you, are wrong.
Tellingly, none of the people who think there are problems with Lisp actually know Lisp.