Related. Others?
Lisping at JPL Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557347 - Jan 2023 (100 comments)
The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524552 - Jan 2023 (145 comments)
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) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989328 - July 2014 (19 comments)
The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 - Feb 2011 (36 comments)
The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304736 - Sept 2008 (72 comments)
> At the time it was more or less taken for granted that AI work was done in Lisp. C++ barely existed. Perl was brand new. Java was years away. Spacecraft were mostly programmed in assembler, or, if you were really being radical, Ada.
Given the choices, Lisp made a lot of sense when they started. After 2001-2004, there were other options - not to say they were necessarily better, but a mainstream language that enables a large number of people working together (interchangeably) has its value. Lisp is indeed "one-of-a-kind, highly dynamic applications that must be developed on extremely tight budgets and schedules" - but has a reputation for fostering lone geniuses and bad for large teams working together and maintaining legacy codebases.
(I write this as a big fan of Lisp.)
Tells one of my all-time favourite stories.
> 1994-1999 - Remote Agent
> Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.
While I was at Amazon, just before AWS, the entire internal network was monitored by a Lisp agent. I'm not sure if that is still true but it was kind of secret, and the internal wiki (only a few sentences) that documented its existence was removed with no deletion record.
Right before my position was outsourced to an entire remote overseas team, we had rolled out AAA* which conceivably cut out any unauthorized automated agents from the loop.
* https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-aaa-authentication-aut...
Version with some pictures here:
https://corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/
It's an interview I did with Ron Garrett about the history of Lisp at the JPL.
> The demise of Lisp at JPL is a tragedy. The language is particularly well suited for the kind of software development that is often done here
That is a shame, but this can be said about many languages of time past. Do schools even teach lisp these days ?
IMO, another casualty of our WEB only environment :(
Very tiny Lisp, Forths and some Pascal like at http://t3x.org
One of them whole numbers as lists. I saw no floats, but there are fractional numbers.
(- '#2 '#3)
=> '#-1
Easy mode:
You are Alonzo Church reincarnated:
>enginner >can't do anything with 128MB. In 2002.
In my country an Engineer with a Bachelor would implement a Forth in KB's in days by just reading the specs or books related to building one.
A Microlisp maybe in weeks.
Also, as a very tiny and minimal Lisp:
Easier than SICP for Scheme and Intro to Symbolic Computation for Common Lisp.
true Evergreen ...nostalgic memories of stories from old 20%-time-and-don-t-be-evil Google days. Sigh. I still hope AI takeoff somehow revives Lisp-as-a-human-friendly-computer-language or something in the vein of this.
Forth would be a good choice too. No GC, use 'forget'.
Author here. This pops up on HN regularly, which I'm happy to see, but it's pretty dated at this point. Here is a more recent update:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited...
And, as always, AMA.