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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)

#71

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #15
abadger9 wrote: post #10

My 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.

It's pretty inherent in those types of projects. How long do big aerospace projects take? (And then they may be canceled when some other bidder wins the deal.) Big hardware development has probably accelerated some overall--the development of new chip architectures and "big iron" computer systems was at least multiple years when I was a product manager, but especially safety critical systems or things you get one sho…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by lmm »

dTal wrote: post #55
toss1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>...all that know-how was stolen by China, who isn't interested in quarterly profits, but in global hegemony... This seems a little simplistic? "China" isn't a monolith, and I'm pretty sure Chinese companies are just as interested in quarterly profits as Western ones. It's not like they're all state enterprises. And they didn't "steal" know-how - they earned it, by doing stuff (aside from the odd case of corporate es…

> It's not like they're all state enterprises.

Isn't it? If the companies all take orders from the state, and have state representatives on their boards, that seems pretty close.

> And they didn't "steal" know-how - they earned it, by doing stuff (aside from the odd case of corporate espionage, which certainly cuts both ways).

Espionage is asymmetric, and there are also cases of China seizing whole companies outright from foreign investors. Capital controls and controls on the ability of foreign companies to do business are very much asymmetric.

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

#73

Post by HexDecOctBin »

spicybright wrote: post #47
bmitc wrote: post #34

Was 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…

> besides the company that did crash bandicoot on the PS1. And even that one I'm unsure of as I feel it's been mythologized with how often it's pointed to.

Well, good instincts, because it wasn't. Naughty Dog used Lisp to write a compiler for an s-expression based C-like language called GOAL (it was kind of a macro-assembler with a register allocator). The reason for using s-expressions was to get a syntactic macro system at compile time.

The game engine was written in this GOAL language. There was no list processing (car, cdr) or garbage collection happening on a PS2, only during compilation in macro-expansion.

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

#74

Post by adastra22 »

jimbokun wrote: post #39
travisgriggs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I love co-ops. I wish there were more of them. I'd love to work for one if the pay was acceptable.

Would be interesting to structure a software startup as a coop. I think the pushback would be the founders and early employees willing to share equally with later employees/members.

Valve is basically that, no?

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

#75

Post by adastra22 »

abadger9 wrote: post #10

My 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.

That’s nothing particular to JPL. When I worked at NASA Ames it was the same story. Government just moves at its own slow pace.

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

#76

Post by safety1st »

toss1 wrote: post #27
Retric wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic premise of MBA programs is arguably to create interchangeable managers. One size fits all is less efficient at both the managerial and employee levels, the advantage is largely risk minimization.

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 s…

The entire strategic advantage of the west was sold out thanks to trying to standardize management? Come on, there's certainly an element of truth with relation to the downsides of globalization, but that's some pretty heavy hyperbole.

In terms of what is wrong with this apocalyptic view of the future, I would start with the idea that China has some unassailable chokehold on the West. A lot of influence over our supply chain (which is at the moment divesting), sure. Someone like Peter Zeihan can articulate it better than I can here (ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzT38jCUpgU), but China is really on its knees at the moment owing in large part to the instability of authoritarian regimes. We might see them get back on their feet in the next few years but we might just as easily see a catastrophic collapse of their government and economy. Time will tell.

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

#77

Post by adastra22 »

dima55 wrote: post #66
abadger9 wrote: post #10

My 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.

You ever worked in fast-paced startups before?

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

#78

Post by adastra22 »

spicybright wrote: post #47
bmitc wrote: post #34

Was 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…

A bit ironic that you post this in a website written in Lisp.

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

#80

Post by michael1999 »

the_af wrote: post #18
michael1999 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not such thing as a best practice without specifying a context. The kind of build hygiene required for long-lived commercial product is very different from disposable marketing content. This is especially toxic when the underlying context and goals are so different. Businesses wants interchangeable programmers for many reasons: so they can ramp team size up and down, so hiring is easy, etc. But the number on…

> There is not such thing as a best practice without specifying a context. Just to be clear: we are in agreement, right? The author of TFA is stating this, and that the JPL misunderstood its own context. It wasn't the kind of business/project where your second paragraph applies, and so the practices they adopted were mistmatched.

Yes.
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