Google Tech Talk: lisp at JPL

[ccc31807]

On Apr 3, 1:53 am, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 〈The Remote Agent Experiment: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles
> Away〉
> Google Tech Talk, (2012-02-14) Presented by Ron Garret. @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ

RG mentions giving a more technical version to a Lisp User Group. Any
chance that this talk is publicly available?

My reaction to this talk, particularly the part near the end, is that
NASA isn't alone. RG uses terms like 'rudderless institutions',
'outreach', 'mission', and others, which would be appropriate when
talking about religious institutions, i.e., churches. I'm not sure
that his prescriptions are addressed to the underlying causes, but
they certainly deal with the symptoms.

As to the question about Python vs. Lisp, I though RG's reaction
(wanting to shed a tear or two) was telling. Languages are tools that
users use to accomplish tasks. Apparently, Python has the appearance
of being a 'better' tool to accomplish programming tasks (at Google,
since that's the context) than Lisp.

My take FWIW is to learn many languages and use them appropriately. In
connection with my job, I recently did a comparison of several
different tasks in C++, ColdFusion, Perl, and Lisp. I use Perl
(mostly) and the tasks were those for which Perl is suited. The
functions are now written in ColdFusion (they are part of a web app.)
I use Lisp in order to highlight the verbosity and ease of different
languages, and even though using Lisp is totally impossible (speaking
to my employer's environment) I can tell you that the Lisp part of the
comparison received the most comment, and the most interesting
comments.

Thanks for the talk, Ron, I really enjoyed it, and wish you (and NASA)
all the best.

CC.