The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
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Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#2Updated last year (edit: no it wasn't), so I've left the date off this one (edit: no I haven't).
Previously:
Lisping at JPL (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113434 - Aug 2021 (9 comments)
Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087419 - Jan 2020 (307 comments)
Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13626074 - Feb 2017 (37 comments)
Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989328 - July 2014 (19 comments)
The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 - Feb 2011 (36 comments)
The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304736 - Sept 2008 (72 comments)
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#3The author is Ron Garret. He was also interviewed last year on the CoRecursive podcast about the merits of Lisp at JPL, and the opposition to it. It’s worth listening to:
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#4This is blogspam, the original is still hosted here by the author himself: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#5> industry best practice
To me that really means "industry best practice at commercial businesses". Moving to a different language because the new one is cool is a big wast of $
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#6I’m intrigued by the distinction between best practice and standard practice. Isn’t it standard because it’s the best? I can understand that non-standard practices might be best in niche situations, but this sounds like a discussion of “traditions are solutions to problems so old we’ve forgotten what they were”.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#7I’m intrigued by the distinction between best practice and standard practice. Isn’t it standard because it’s the best? I can understand that non-standard practices might be best in niche situations, but this sounds like a discussion of “traditions are solutions to problems so old we’ve forgotten what they were”.
My read is that a standard industry practice (e.g. considering programmers interchangeable pieces and that components should be designed with that in mind) will work in many situations, and therefore the "standard" is reasonable for most of them, but the best practice is context-sensitive; in this case, the context didn't require C++/Java and they were actually not good choices. This was specialized, mission-critical software developed on a tight schedule and swapping programmers in/out of the project simply wouldn't work, so many considerations for choosing (say) Java were out of the question.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#8The author is Ron Garret. He was also interviewed last year on the CoRecursive podcast about the merits of Lisp at JPL, and the opposition to it. It’s worth listening to: https://www.corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/
He is also here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lisper
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#9> The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components.
I've wondered about this a lot lately. It's not limited to software engineering only, you see it in other creative/human domains as well. Media production. Teaching. So on.
But it's made me wonder, why doesn't the equation ever invert:
"The world has tried to develop _management_ processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components."
Why has management never come under the scrutiny of "one size fits all" and the subsequent salary/headcount reduction?
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#10My mentor worked at JPL - he was a BS, MS, PhD from MIT - he got out of there so quick (i believe less than 2 years). He said the pace of work was so slow, he didn't feel like anything got done in his entire time there.