[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of Lisp at JPL
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The Rise and Fall of Lisp at JPL
Author : sandinmyjoints
Score : 84 points
Date : 2020-01-18 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flownet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flownet.com)
| FpUser wrote:
| I think it is not so much a testament to Lisp as to a talents of
| a people who wrote the software. I've met some of those. Give
| them anything and they'll still produce stunning results. Those
| were real doers. Can't even call them programmers, they had
| something better: brains size of f..ng Manhattan.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| (2002)
|
| Author is @lisper around here. They've mentioned this story a few
| times.
| Rochus wrote:
| Here is another interesting article by Garret (i.e. Erann Gat):
| http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf
| [deleted]
| proximitysauce wrote:
| I really feel like they should teach LISP in elementary school.
| It has extremely simple rules to get started and helps people
| intuitively understand programming concepts. Maybe an updated The
| Little Schemer style curriculum:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| On the subject of education, pg links to a great story on
| Scheme (a Lisp 1) in education [1] from his essay "Beating the
| Averages" [2]. The story references a book, "A Schemer's Guide"
| that is a good Scheme/Lisp or programming learning reference
| [3].
|
| If you know folks learning programming for the first time and
| maybe struggling with Java or whatever they're using, these
| references may help. Sometimes you just need to see things like
| recursion or currying in a different way for it to click.
|
| [1]:http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html
|
| [2]:http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
|
| [3]:https://www.worldcat.org/title/schemers-guide/oclc/24430531
|
| [4]:https://schemers.org/Documents/ (more Scheme resources)
|
| [5]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| I did teach my son Racket at age 8, as his first programming
| language. He was able to make a number guessing game in it. I
| think we used "Realm of Racket," but I don't recall, as it was
| some years ago. He's now midway through high school and not a
| single course at his STEM middle school or high school has come
| close to teaching him as much as he learned at age 8.
| gowld wrote:
| That difference is more because classes are designed to be
| extremely slow and low paced so the worst student can pass.
| Learning anything with a personal tutor is much more
| efficient.
| cocktailpeanuts wrote:
| You don't understand why kids would want to learn programming.
| At least those who do, want to learn because they can build
| cool things they can show off to friends.
|
| It's not about whether a programming language is simple or not.
| (I actually think LISP is not as simple to understand as
| imperative languages, unlike most nerds think) It's about what
| you can build with it.
|
| For example, my first experience with programming was to build
| a game. If someone had tried to force-teach me LISP, it would
| have actually had opposite effect on me because then it would
| be no different from someone trying to force teach me some
| boring subject I have no interest in. The best way to teach
| something is to provide gratification. LISP is only gratifying
| to nerds who marvel at its "elegance", but it has no ecosystem
| which has tons of cool projects like fancy graphic engine or
| fancy game engine. It's just a "cool" language to nerds.
|
| DON'T teach your kids LISP if you want them to love
| programming. Teach them JavaScript or Python, or anything they
| can build something tangible with which they can show off to
| their friends.
| serf wrote:
| >You don't understand why kids would want to learn
| programming. At least those who do, want to learn because
| they can build cool things they can show off to friends.
|
| I mean, this isn't true for everyone of course, but I began
| learning to code at around 8 or 9 years old because I was
| heavily interested in math and numbers, and _precisely
| because_ I didn 't have many friends (or brothers or sisters)
| to occupy my time with when I was very young.
|
| I had a second-hand IBM XT from my fathers' shop at first,
| and I wanted to learn how to do things with it.
|
| I agree with the premise that the majority of folks learn
| better with a practical goal in mind, but I disagree with you
| that there exists only one kind of curious child.
|
| My first project as an 8 or 9 year old was a prime number
| generator (a naive sieve). I had read a book about patterns,
| and primes had been mentioned. I took a trip to the city
| library (another rarity statistically?) and picked up a guide
| to Pascal that was written towards small business owners and
| non-CS college students to help them with simple automation,
| and got to work looking up terms.
|
| A week or two later I had a CLI program that spat out primes
| as fast as my computer (or my poor implementation..) could
| make them.
|
| I then tried to use those primes to draw trippy pictures,
| which began another foray into programming topic that were
| new to me, necessitating more work looking up terms and
| generally haunting the library.
|
| Years later, when I was a teenager, when I ran into like-
| minded computer folks and we'd get to talking, that same
| prime generator got spun into a small benchmarking suite that
| my friends and I toyed with before the multi-core trends.
|
| so.. I guess that the "show it off to friends" thing still
| happened, but knowing myself and how I learn, I doubt that
| i'd have ever been interested in a hobby that was pushed
| towards me by authority figures as being useful.
|
| I have a hard time conceiving how I would become a 'computer
| person' now-a-days, in fact. I was so anti-social and
| actively hostile towards teachers that the idea that one of
| them could have tutored me in the hobby , quite counter-
| intuitively, may have been the exact reason I would have
| avoided it as a child.
|
| really, my grand tl;dr : "There is no one teaching method."
| bgorman wrote:
| Why not Clojurescript? It has access to the whole JS
| ecosystem.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Too much friction an incidental complexity for a kid, they
| will have to be familiar with JS anyway.
| Oreb wrote:
| Why? Even as a professional developer, it's extremely
| unusual that my cljs work requires any JS familiarity. I
| don't see why a complete beginner would even need to know
| that JS exists.
| [deleted]
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| This really is true. I learned Logo in middle school, didn't
| want to be a programmer, took a Java class in college because
| it was required for actuarial science, then read some PG
| essays.
|
| Lisp should be forbidden to young programmers, precisely so
| they'll go seek it out.
| mdtusz wrote:
| I'd argue that racket's ecosystem is ideal for getting young
| people interested. You can build gui tools and do graphics
| programming out of the box, very easily.
|
| My go to language to refer people who want to learn is
| Processing though. Easy to use, and the documentation is
| fantastic (and Dan Shiffman is IMO the best programming
| educator out there for kids and adults alike, whether or not
| you like his high-energy style).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You don't understand why kids would want to learn
| programming.
|
| I started by typing in listings from a book (101 Basic
| Games). Then I'd start modifying the games. Then I'd write my
| own. It's how people learn.
|
| For a famous example, look at the Beatles. They started by
| copying other tunes. Then they modified the copies. Then they
| wrote their own.
| kick wrote:
| John Carmack seems to disagree.
|
| https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?.
| ..
|
| https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-
| users/yjRuIxy... (Make sure to look around in this thread; he
| has a few comments.)
|
| https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/635839636754038784?.
| ..
| cocktailpeanuts wrote:
| This is because people who are really great at something
| have already forgotten what they used to be like when they
| first started out. They just tend to think everybody would
| be excited about the cool thing they themselves are excited
| about.
|
| In most cases, people who are masters at something tend to
| be the worst teachers because by becoming the master they
| have forgotten how to sympathize with complete newbies.
| kick wrote:
| He successfully taught his child Lisp, in a way that
| caused that child to release a video game. He didn't
| forget anything.
| Oreb wrote:
| Lisp (especially Common Lisp) works just fine as an
| imperative language, even if it's not the most common style.
| And there are entire books written about using Lisp for game
| development.
|
| If the goal is for a beginner (whether child or adult) to be
| able to make cool things fast, Lisp is a great choice. The
| interactivity and the simple syntax makes it very easy to get
| up and running compared to more mainstream languages.
| cocktailpeanuts wrote:
| When was the last time you saw a kid who made a cool game
| or software and made money using LISP?
|
| The best motivator is recognition. Kids don't care if a
| language has books and whether there "exists" a game
| development kit. They only care about how much satisfaction
| they will get by learning something and building something
| with it.
|
| If you want your kid to learn programming, the best
| approach is to teach them Swift or Java, or Javascript, so
| they can build a mobile app or web app and show off to
| their friends. And they will get the joy of building
| something that is actually used by others. That's how you
| get people to be interested.
|
| LISP won't get you anywhere in that sense. Sure you may
| learn some programming concepts, but the ROI is not worth
| it. Kids might as well spend a bit more effort to learn
| languages with more exposure and actually feel the
| satisfaction of having real users.
| __s wrote:
| Yep. From age 12 to 15 I messed around in Game Maker, didn't
| need anything else
| dnautics wrote:
| I learned lisp (edscheme) in elementary school. Wrote a
| language interpreter in 4 weeks. Interestingly, 2 of my 3 my
| favorite languages are very lisp-inspired (but of course,
| without the parentheses)
| Impossible wrote:
| Which languages? JavaScript and Lua?
| haolez wrote:
| I would prefer Forth. It's simple and yet manages to be close
| to the hardware.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the first who makes his 7yo write a scheme in Forth gets my
| grid laptop
| kick wrote:
| This isn't at all implausible: one of you should take
| 'agumonkey up on this! I wrote my first Scheme interpreter
| at 11, and an older friend of mine taught me Forth a bit
| before that. I wrote my interpreter with a bootleg (and
| ancient) APL2 copy, though.
|
| With parental guidance, a 7 year old could totally do this.
| Figuring out how to handle the stack will be the trickiest
| part, and there are a few examples online of this, so if
| you nudge them in the direction of others' work, they
| should be able to get it pretty quickly. They'd finish it
| by the time they're 8, at least.
| proximitysauce wrote:
| Forth would be great too. I think there's value in learning a
| stack based language. That being said I suspect LISP is more
| practical.
| jes5199 wrote:
| they're practically two sides of the same coin. I keep
| thinking it should be possible to build a toy language that
| has both a forth-like mode and a lisp-like mode, that use
| the same standard library
| jhbadger wrote:
| In a way they did. in the 1980s, Logo was popularly taught in
| elementary schools, and while lacking sexps, it was clearly
| inspired by Lisp in the way it was a functional language in the
| way the other popular teaching language BASIC clearly wasn't.
| bitwalker wrote:
| Yeah, I learned Logo in elementary school and it was
| something that stuck with me until I actually started
| programming later on in school. I particularly remember
| having to write a program to navigate a maze, it was a blast!
| gowld wrote:
| Scratch is a better introduction and wildly popular. Scheme is
| good middle school math classes -- it's smart but doesn't get
| things done easily. Python is great for getting cool stuff
| built once kids can handle syntax.
| zerr wrote:
| I'm glad that Lisp is not used in spacecraft control system.
| exdsq wrote:
| Why?
| dboreham wrote:
| Leave out one parenthesis and...you miss Venus?
| exdsq wrote:
| I've read that they use Matlab which suffers from the same
| issues
| ken wrote:
| Leave out one parenthesis and your program doesn't compile,
| i.e., exactly the same failure mode as almost any other
| language.
| coldtea wrote:
| This isn't even worthy of Reddit
| [deleted]
| GhettoMaestro wrote:
| Why? (Legitimately asking)
| coldtea wrote:
| Yes, they only mentioned several wild successes, why would they
| want to continue having them?
| cbanek wrote:
| This just reminds me of how many times I've been told things like
| "you can't use that java code that is open source and working and
| does exactly what we want - we're a python shop!" and other such
| nonsenses.
|
| I'm always amazed at how people have strong feelings for the
| tools/languages, rather than what they do and how they can help
| you. Even in this example, the Google person didn't even ask what
| they wanted to use Lisp for.
|
| People I guess just really like rewriting software in different
| languages?
| zxcmx wrote:
| It's situation dependent right?
|
| As an engineering manager, you _could_ support every team or
| even every individual using whatever they like - but you then
| have other tradeoffs to make.
|
| It's now not possible to run security tooling over everything
| or use a common artifact repository or follow common coding
| guidelines or linter settings and you'll get islands of
| language culture and endless internal reinvention and
| rewriting.
| pritovido wrote:
| For me it makes lots of sense, it is not "nonsense".
|
| Java is a gigantic dependency. Any project that depends on it
| adds all this dependency with it. In many cases this dependency
| could be bad or toxic for the project.
|
| It depends of what you do for a living. Personally I will never
| let anyone include java as a dependency in my company's
| projects, because for what we do, java is slow and linked to
| Oracle.
|
| Lisp is a different story. You can create c ,Python, Lua,c++ or
| whatever code from Lisp easily.
| rb808 wrote:
| Ugh, you haven't experience pain until you've worked on a
| project which has a bunch of different languages because Johnny
| wanted to use Scala, Freddy loved PERL and Sally was learning
| Elixir on the side. They all left and the new team has to
| figure out how all these stupid languages even build.
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