I believe the original author posts around here, @lispm IIRC?
lisper I believe, not lispm
Yep.
The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
61–70 of 153 posts
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you familiar with the concept of co-ops? A lot of businesses are run by their workers or their members/consumers. They can hire or fire people to work as management as they see fit. It's not very unlike the board of investors of a business hiring or firing management, except instead of a board of investors you have co-op members.
Yeah, I love co-ops. I wish there were more of them. I'd love to work for one if the pay was acceptable.
https://galois.com is employee-owned, and AFAIK they use interesting technologies like Haskell, theorem provers, etc.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#63Author here. AMA.
[deleted]
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#64> 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 _m…
The franchise restaurant world has tried to develop management processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. McDonalds is probably the most prominent example. The system works fairly well.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-hamburger-universi...
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#65I used to be a fan of programmer productivity and having the best tools to express ideas in. In our case, this is not about LISP, but about being able to write 40 lines of SQL in half an hour to solve things that other people reach for 1000 lines of backend language to do. But also trying hard to identify opportunities to simplify and delete code instead of adding another layer of complexity on top every time somethi…
You see related issues with operations too. I was contracted to a company using WebSphere, and they had 4 people (including myself) doing very little except tediously deploying applications to the clusters.
So I took a chunk of my downtime and wrote a deployment engine, to eliminate some of the common mistakes, and ideally make things much faster/predictable.
In hindsight I can see why the team didn't like the idea: in addition to the new Perl code that someone would have to support, it was a serious risk to their jobs. If deployments that previously took 2-3 hours of tedium were reduced to 20 minutes of scripting, why would they need 4 people to do it?
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#66My 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.
YMMV. I'm a JPLer. We get plenty done.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#67Was Lisp actually ever risen at JPL, or was it just used on these handful of projects by a single or small group of developers? > At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed. I like Lisp and am certainly no fan of the complex…
I'm going to straw man a bit, but it feels like lisp enthusiasts are desperate to find stories of commercial software being written in lisp. I'm sure there's many examples I haven't heard of that are legitimate (using lisp for almost all of a specific domain at scale and having a mature codebase, tho that's arguable) but I've yet to see any example that has meat on it's bones, besides the company that did crash bandi…
Autodesk cad cam ? Was that not Lisp?
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing that gives me hope is that the type of knowledge generation environment in the western world still hasn’t been acquired by dictatorial powers like China. Given the exponentially increasing technological change we’re experiencing, the knowledge transferred via the method you described will likely be surpassed and rendered obsolete relatively quickly (hopefully) and make that transferred knowledge less l…
This sounds to me like an imagined meritocracy fantasy, which in practice would end up a dystopia rife with corruption, injustice, and arrogance.
Aiming towards a legitimate meritocracy is the least dystopian aim possible.
Aiming at anything else will simply be a less effective, more corrupt, more unjust, more arrogantly constructed system.
True meritocracy requires aiming away from corruption, towards justice, and towards humility. That will never be perfectly achieved, but the lack of willingness to even aim at the target in large sectors of society at the moment is something I find both incredibly depressing and incredibly counterproductive strategically. There are tools and procedures that can be systematically employed to measure merit that, while imperfect, are better than nothing, and seem to be increasingly rejected because people don’t like the results. Those results are not something that should be considered static nor perfectly calibrated to merit nor reflective of worth as a high status member of society. But the incredible amount of sensitivity around any attempt at identifying and nurturing people with signs of high potential regardless of background is a giant achilles heel affecting all of society. Failing to properly address and assuage those sensitivities so we can pursue meritocracy to the extent possible harms everyone in the long run.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#69My 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.
This is a bit off topic but your comment reminded me of something I learned only comparatively recently: while these degrees are things we earn one at a time, they are sequential and the result is that your status (the degree to which you have climbed the academic ladder) does not accumulate, it only changes.
So at one point in time your mentor would have held the status / degree / title of Bachelor of Science. They were then promoted to Master, and then to Doctor.
That’s probably what you’re saying, and this isn’t really a correction. It’s simply something interesting that I wanted to share with everyone else.
Re: The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)
#70Author here. AMA.
How do you feel about Lisp in 2023 compared to your opinions as expressed in the article?
How do you feel about Clojure?
I’m a seasoned software engineer in 2023 that has worked up and down the stack that has always wanted to get into Lisp. What’s the 2023 way to do it?