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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)

#101

Post by lisper »

davidthewatson wrote: post #82
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.

Indeed. This gives rise to the triumph of robotomorphism over anthropomorphism, i.e. HR as human robots. It's easier to hire humans that act like robots than to design robots that act like humans. Robots have an uncanny valley described on wikipedia, that, when reversed, leaves us with a robot-centric human critique: In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between a human's degree of resemblance…

Also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

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

#102

Post by brabel »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #91
dTal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...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…

The USA maintains military bases in all corners of the world. From Australia to Guam, Eastern Europe to Brazil. If they're not interested in hegemony and all they want is to spread democracy (sounds eerily similar to the jesuits in the 1500's trying to christen the savages) why would they do that?

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

#103

Post by uxcolumbo »

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…

Nubank, largest fintech bank across Latin America uses Clojure extensively.

https://building.nubank.com.br/working-with-clojure-at-nuban...

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

#104

Post by beefield »

didericis wrote: post #86
FpUser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"educate those who are not in that first highly selective pool of people how to be good citizens" My answer to blessed self appointed "teachers": how about fuck you? We'll "figure how to be good citizens" on our own.

This perfectly illustrates the problem. “Blessed self appointed teachers” should not and cannot exist in any functional actually meritocratic system. In order for mass civic education to be effective there needs to be a core set of criteria for what constitutes a good teacher and a good citizen that all parties negotiate on and largely agree on (to the extent possible) that’s actually (not just superficially) bottom…

> That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim.

What makes you confident that not fully realized version of your utopia does not end up being a dystopia? For reference, see what happened for the not fully realized utopia of communism in Soviet Union

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

#105

Post by revskill »

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...)

I think it's about explicitness vs implicitness.

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

#106

Post by somenameforme »

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…

SpaceX is currently set to revolutionize the entire space industry (again) with Starship. The abstract idea of Starship was only first presented at a conference in 2017. By 2020 they had developed and were doing individual component flight tests. They just had their first fully fueled test of the entire integrated system yesterday.

Assuming they keep at pace, there will imminently be a static fire and it will be headed to space this year. And to emphasize it's not some evolutionary thing but a complete rethinking of rocket design, unlike anything before, that stands to once again completely revolutionize the industry should it succeed.

Going from spitballing to revolutionizing space, in 6 years (2 of those years being during a highly disruptive pandemic), on a private budget? I'm inclined to say the problem is government, but I'm almost wondering if that isn't just a knee-jerk. It just seems that in modern time that many "businesses", government included, just don't really have the capacity to move quickly - even when it's 100% possible.

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

#107

Post by lisper »

didericis wrote: post #86
FpUser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"educate those who are not in that first highly selective pool of people how to be good citizens" My answer to blessed self appointed "teachers": how about fuck you? We'll "figure how to be good citizens" on our own.

This perfectly illustrates the problem. “Blessed self appointed teachers” should not and cannot exist in any functional actually meritocratic system. In order for mass civic education to be effective there needs to be a core set of criteria for what constitutes a good teacher and a good citizen that all parties negotiate on and largely agree on (to the extent possible) that’s actually (not just superficially) bottom…

> That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim.

I agree.

Can you please put some contact info in your profile and/or contact me off line? I would love to discuss this with you further if you're interested.

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

#108

Post by sph »

lisper wrote: post #59
dang wrote: post #2

Updated 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) - ht…

> Updated last year I don't think so. What gave you that idea?

This post was pointing elsewhere, and said it had been revised in 2022, even though the source is from 2002.

dang later change this post to point towards the original 2002 source.

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

#109

Post by tm-guimaraes »

adastra22 wrote: post #74
jimbokun wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. Valve is privately owned, with GabeN having a big share (AFAIK, since it's private, we wouldn't easily know who/what owns each % of Valve)

You might hear about Valve in these kind of discussion not because of its ownership model but because of its "flat hierarchy", the philosophy of "no boss". But obviously, humans always organise in hierarchies, companies like Valve simply have no formal ones, you just have to navigate well social/politically to understand who you need to please.

Also, a single person can't usually deliver a big project in a reasonable timescale, so how do you get a team?

There's always a lot of more politics (arguing around, convincing others) involved in flat-hierarchies or co-ops, but they are much less likely to get a power hungry vulture dictating things.

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

#110

Post by lisper »

sph wrote: post #108
lisper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Updated last year I don't think so. What gave you that idea?

This post was pointing elsewhere, and said it had been revised in 2022, even though the source is from 2002. dang later change this post to point towards the original 2002 source.

Yeah, I eventually figured that out, but by the time I did it was too late to edit my comment.
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