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

I've read this article some years ago and always wanted to ask: besides size, what were the arguments against Lisp in JPL? Author's position is biased, as he recognizes, then I'm curious about the other side in this story.

Because capitalism incentivizes maximizing capital flow to the owner of the organization. Making labor interchangeable and delivering a minimally viable end product are both ways of minimizing capital that could otherwise be made to flow to the owner of the organization.

If you want to create a management style that optimizes for quality of product or optimizes for management styles that reflect the needs of labor, instead of a process that optimizes for minimizing labor, then you need to change the incentivization plan accordingly.

>Phillips screws suck.

I felt this way through my entire engineering life until I bought a sailboat.

Everything on marine stuff tends to be flat-head or similar design -- engaging a flat driver into a slot in a bumpy/roll-y ocean is hell. The self-centering engagement aspect of a cross-socket style drive is absolutely fantastic after a long day of trying to tighten flat-slot fastened tube-clamps and the like at sea during calm conditions, let alone during weather.

That said -- yes, phillips head sucks, they round out and won't handle any decent amount of torque over repeated sessions without deformation. Robertson (square)/allen/torx kind of suck at sea, because they lack any form of self-centering without using special taper drivers.

In a perfect world I think that I would like to use pozi-driv fasteners and drivers everywhere, but the reality is that there are so many types of specialty hardware in use in the marine-world that it would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to switch it all entirely over.

Yup

Except that it is only local or small risk minimization; the catastrophic existential risks end up maximized to the point of becoming inevitable.

With companies, the MBAs happily optimize away anything that isn't immediate revenue. So manufacturing gets offshored, along with all the deep knowledge of how to make things. R&D gets shrunk and minimized because it is a quarterly expense with returns not immediately specified. They kill or sell off all the "dogs" of products and try to milk the "cash cows". This makes the numbers look great until things change and the "cash cows" need updating for a new market environment. But the company now has no idea how to do it because they have no seasoned and up to date product development, no R&D technology development, and no manufacturing know-how. So, it goes into a death spiral if it hasn't already been disrupted.

On the societal level, MBAs justified the western world outsourcing all the manufacturing because it was "fungible" and cheaper to do it offshore, made more profits this quarter. Meanwhile, all that know-how was stolen by China, who isn't interested in quarterly profits, but in global hegemony, and now has both economic and strategic chokeholds on the western democracies (everything from corners on lithium and solar panel markets, to spies in western corporations, to backdoors in key commercial and likely military microchips). The entire strategic advantage of the west was sold out for a few dozen quarters of increased profits. This will go down as a colossal strategic blunder of historic proportions.

All thanks to trying to standardize management.

High-assurance isn't really the culprit. It's more of a funding issue. If long NASA programs could save part of the first year's budget to use the second year, things would go a lot faster.

You might get hired into an overstaffed team and not do that much for a year until it's crunch time and then you're underfunded so it takes an extra year. Arguably you spent three years to achieve one year's worth of accomplishments.