Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

flownet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#11

Post by chris_j »

chris_j wrote: post #10
Zakharov wrote: post #7

As someone who's never used Lisp before, what's the difference between Lisp and Haskell? I keep hearing old stories about the virtues of Lisp, but it doesn't seem like anyone uses it anymore. Has it just been replaced by newer functional languages?

The main difference between Lisp and other languages (including Haskell) is that Lisp is homoiconic. That is, a Lisp program is represented as a list, a data structure that can itself be manipulated by a Lisp program. This means that a Lisp program can contain macros that can generate Lisp code at compile time (or even at runtime). This might sound dangerous, especially if you have seen C macros or C++ templates bein…

PS - I mentioned that for loops are implemented as a macro in Clojure. I should have said list comprehensions. Have a look at the clojure source here and search for "(defmacro for" to see what I mean. It's awesome to think that, if this hadn't already been in the language, you could have written it yourself.

https://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/master/src/clj/cl...

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#13

Post by SamReidHughes »

thirsteh wrote: post #12

Nice article, but I really didn't like the ending. It seemed a lot like Republican "everything the government does is wrong and costs taxpayer dollars" propaganda.

Nice comment, but I really didn't like the presumption. It seemed a lot like the internet commentator "let's discard the actual content of the article and niggle around about our misinterpretation of an irrelevant tidbit" archetype.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#14

Post by Maro »

I think the article lacks a lot of meat. It talks about what the author used Lisp for, but it doesn't really dicsuss why he thinks Lisp should be used, or why others thought it should not be used.

For example,

"Someone (I don't know who) interrupted him [the software integration engineer] and asked if he could change only one thing to make things better what would it be. His answer was: get rid of Lisp. That one event was pretty much the end of Lisp at JPL."

Why did the integration engineer say that? This should be the cornerstone of the article. Same thing goes for the Google discussion he quotes.

Also, the author doesn't seem to take market forces into effect, eg. given that C++/Java became the dominant languages, I'm almost certain there were (are) not enough Lisp programmers on the market for Lisp to be a feasible technology at a large organization.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#15

Post by brlewis »

Maro wrote: post #14

I think the article lacks a lot of meat. It talks about what the author used Lisp for, but it doesn't really dicsuss why he thinks Lisp should be used, or why others thought it should not be used. For example, "Someone (I don't know who) interrupted him [the software integration engineer] and asked if he could change only one thing to make things better what would it be. His answer was: get rid of Lisp. That one even…

You're right, it should be the cornerstone of the article. Unfortunately it's relegated to note [3] and the postscript, where we learn that buggy C code was the cause of the integration engineer's Lisp headaches.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#16

Post by [deleted] »

brlewis wrote: post #15
Maro wrote: post #14

I think the article lacks a lot of meat. It talks about what the author used Lisp for, but it doesn't really dicsuss why he thinks Lisp should be used, or why others thought it should not be used. For example, "Someone (I don't know who) interrupted him [the software integration engineer] and asked if he could change only one thing to make things better what would it be. His answer was: get rid of Lisp. That one even…

You're right, it should be the cornerstone of the article. Unfortunately it's relegated to note [3] and the postscript, where we learn that buggy C code was the cause of the integration engineer's Lisp headaches.

[deleted]

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#18

Post by rbanffy »

mturmon wrote: post #2

Here's the paper that summarizes the results of the Remote Agent flight experiment ("RAX"), which is the project Erann was working on at the time: www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/papers/rax-results-isairas99.ps The stuff about integrating a Lisp executive/planner and the rest of the C flight software is in section 4.1. It's for sure none of this flight software is in Lisp any more. Additionally, I would be highly surpris…

> Both flight and ground s/w is almost certainly in (...) Java.

Which is why we have to use chemical rockets - Java's license would prohibit it from controlling a nuclear engine ;-)

Seriously, I have seen many projects jettison good, solid, time-tested and efficient code on the grounds that it was written in a language "nobody understands" (exotic and hard-to-master things like... Python). My last problem was with someone having the bright idea of re-implementing Amazon's S3 internally because they would need to handle huge amounts of data. It turns out their "huge amounts of data" is a couple terabytes of large files.

The other was when someone said a given system was written using J2EE "(what else?)".

Sometimes I wonder if this is the dumbest generation ever to operate the smartest tools ever.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#19

Post by tom_b »

From the article: "The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. To my mind, the hallmark of the interchangeable component model of software engineers is Java."

I hate that attitude in management. I've been surprised to find that at higher levels (think C-level) of management leaders who completely don't think of engineers as plug-and-play. I wonder if it is an attitude or viewpoint more common in lower level management in large organizations.

Regardless, I kind of gave up on Java simply because I felt it seemed to get me into environments where people were treated as cogs.

Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

#20

Post by thirsteh »

lisper wrote: post #17
thirsteh wrote: post #12

Nice article, but I really didn't like the ending. It seemed a lot like Republican "everything the government does is wrong and costs taxpayer dollars" propaganda.

FWIW, the author is a Democrat.

And? That doesn't change what was written.
Post reply on HN