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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)

#91

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

> Nor is the United States any less interested in global hegemony than China.

In as far as United States is a democracy, it is not interested in global "hegemony". It is interested in Democracy spreading all over the world. Democracy is not hegemony but freedom for one person to have one vote and nobody being above the law. Of course that could change. A Nazi party could gain the power in US. Then you could say that US is interested in global hegemony for sure.

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

#92

Post by steve1977 »

travisgriggs wrote: post #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 _m…

In my experience, many managers don’t operate on the basis of professional skills, but on their network with other managers and people.

This makes them them harder to replace, but it also makes it harder for them to switch companies.

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

#93

Post by kqr »

noobermin wrote: post #87

Nowhere near the same situation but the same spirit, a lot of computational science still uses fortran (f90, thankfully for more modern codes) and has resisted the push to use C++ like everyone else. Fortran still is the right tool for numerical software, so it's good we avoided the bandwagon.

A relative of mine had a huge fight at work a few years ago with younger management who wanted to re-write the core of their simulation software in Java, instead of maintaining the Fortran code. I trust his judgment when he said it would be a bad idea.

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

#94

Post by lisper »

marai2 wrote: post #89
lisper wrote: post #57

Author here. AMA.

Since this essay cycles here on HN perennially and inevitably people are curious about how your views about lisp, or other languages have changed, you might want to have a follow up page that you forever keep on updating as your views change? Maybe linked from the original article? Such as: Year 2033 - lisp is still a great language for $xyz Year 2043 - I was wrong, I should have used COBOL all along, how was I so bl…

That's a good idea. In fact, I have some down time at the moment, I'll try to get it done today.

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

#95

Post by lisper »

noobermin wrote: post #88
lisper wrote: post #57

Author here. AMA.

What do you think about clojure? It is lisp but runs on the jvm of course, so it kind of does the thing you like (being lisp) but does the thing you don't like (enable replacement by using the jvm)

I've never tried Clojure but from what I've read it seems pretty spiffy.

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

#96

Post by lisper »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #70
lisper wrote: post #57

Author 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?

> How do you feel about Lisp in 2023 compared to your opinions as expressed in the article?

I feel pretty much the same way today as I did then.

> How do you feel about Clojure?

I've never used but, but from what I've read it looks pretty spiffy.

> 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?

Just do it. There are a zillion Lisps to choose from and a zillion tutorials and books, just pick one and start writing (or, even better, reading) some code.

My personal favorite is Clozure Common Lisp on a Mac. For a starter text, PG's and PN's (Peter Norvig) books are pretty good. But nothing beats just picking a little project and building something.

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

#97

Post by safety1st »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #90
safety1st wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supp…

US needs China and China needs US. The Wealth of Nations. The only problem as you say is the authoritarian regime in China which opposes progress for its people, because the authoritarians have taken over so of course they look after their own interests not the interests of the majority. Therefore progress is coming very slowly to the masses. China used to be ruled by a "junta" but now it seems it is ruled by a dicta…

> US needs China and China needs US

It's more accurate to say: "China needs the cooperation of the US and EU in order to sustain its growth. But with enough effort, the US and EU can find a replacement for China."

You can relocate supply but you can't relocate demand. The West can find new partners to buy stuff from, like India and Vietnam, and is doing so now. If it really wants to it can pump money into those countries to speed up the process. World leaders are now acutely aware of China's political instability - I think no matter what happens, the era of China being the whole world's indispensable supplier is over, no one is really comfortable with it anymore. Between Covid and Jinping, China has only itself to blame.

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

#98

Post by lisper »

adastra22 wrote: post #79
lisper wrote: post #57

Author here. AMA.

Have you done more with Lisp since then? (Your username suggests so)

Yes, a lot. In fact, for the last 5-6 years I have been working to help develop and maintain a tool for VLSI chip design written in Common Lisp. (Unfortunately, the company that built it was recently acquired by a large publicly traded corporation, and they have decided to kill the project. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.)

I have also done a lot of personal coding in CL. Most recently I wrote a spam filter that I use in production on my personal mail server.

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

#99

Post by xarope »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #67
spicybright wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

autolisp was definitely lisp'ish, I hacked some macros at some time.

but nowadays it's C# and python in Revit

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

#100

Post by 082349872349872 »

pmarreck wrote: post #51

Is every "advanced" language doomed to fail? (where "advanced" means: a paradigm that results in greater economy of code per unit of work done, easier debugging, easier testing, complete elimination of entire classes of bug (such as in an immutable language), easier maintenance etc...)

Structured languages didn't fail, and OO languages took over a few niches.
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