I think you hit the nail on the head about the space industry being risk averse. I think that guides a lot of their decision making. I took a compiler class th

I think you hit the nail on the head about the space industry being risk averse. I think that guides a lot of their decision making. I took a compiler class that was taught by the inventor (Dr. Daniel Cooke) of another functional language, SequenceL (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SequenceL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SequenceL). Cooke had funding from NASA to develop SequenceL because evidently NASA was/is very interested in program correctness (it's hard to guarantee correctness of a C++ program) and a simplified programming model. The way Cooke explained it in class, SequenceL was born out of a desire for a simpler programming language (he believed that modern programming languages are too complex - so many require extra tooling to be productive) and a desire to make the implementation of a program as close as possible to the definition of the problem. He reasoned that if you could make an executable specification (i.e. the definition of the problem was executable), then all the mistakes that implementers make while implementing a program based on the problem specification/requirements would go away. In other words, since the definition of the problem would be the implementation, zero implementation mistakes would be made. Interestingly enough, the first SequenceL interpreter and compiler was written in Haskell.