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I'm glad that Lisp is not used in spacecraft control system.
by zerr 7y ago
I'm glad that Lisp is not used in spacecraft control system.
- exdsq 7y agoWhy?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dboreham 7y agoLeave out one parenthesis and...you miss Venus?
- exdsq 7y agoI've read that they use Matlab which suffers from the same issues
- mhh__ 7y agoMentioning MATLAB in the same context as lisp is almost blasphemy
- ken 7y agoLeave out one parenthesis and your program doesn’t compile, i.e., exactly the same failure mode as almost any other language.
- coldtea 7y agoThis isn't even worthy of Reddit
- flavio81 7y ago>Leave out one parenthesis and...you miss Venus? You won't, since Lisp editors automatically keep parentheses balanced.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoWhy? (Legitimately asking)
- dehrmann 7y agoI think C and C++ are the most popular languages for hard real time development, so you'll have better OS support, better best practices, more experience if you choose one of those. But I don't do things in hard real time, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
- lisper 7y agoYou're not wrong. But "most popular" != "best". The Lisp we used on DS1 was hard-real-time.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agodid you ever work with Ed Gamble perchance? such a cool community we have here.
- lisper 7y agoYes, we worked together on the Remote Agent project.
- flavio81 7y agoYou're doing God's work, Ron.
- lisper 7y ago:-)
- p_l 7y agoA lot of aerospace real-time environments are still geared for Ada, and while C/C++ are available they are not the same as "vanilla" C/C++. Also, is there really C-specific support in a good RTOS? Probably doubtful, except for inertia or presence of header files if they expose them.
- coldtea 7y agoYes, they only mentioned several wild successes, why would they want to continue having them?
- AnimalMuppet 7y agozerr's post reads like Lisp is some kind of terminal disease that will cause spacecraft to slowly get cancer or something. It sounds like completely irrational hostility. But the article reads like blatant fanboy-ism, as if Lisp turned spacecraft into unicorns that magically distributed rainbows around the solar system or something. It's completely oblivious to the organizational cost (except, oddly, at Google). What's the organizational cost of Lisp at JPL? Somebody's got to maintain these tools for decades. Over the lifetime of a spacecraft mission, people leave. People even die. If nobody understands the software (or the tools the software depends on, including the build chain), then when someone other than the original magician has to fix something, you're stuck. JPL really doesn't want to be stuck when a probe is approaching a planet and a fix is needed to make the mission work. The article has zero recognition that such issues could even exist.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago> If nobody understands the software (or the tools the software depends on, including the build chain), then when someone other than the original magician has to fix something, you're stuck. Well the great news is that its Lisp, the language is simple. You have the same problem with other languages, except if you used C++, everything just got a magnitude more complicated, both because the whole thing is more complex and the ecosystem is changing and developing more rapidly.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWith Lisp, the language is simple. But everyone writes their own DSL on top of the language because the language is simple. It's easy to do in Lisp, but it's also easy to make it incomprehensible to anyone else. I've heard this called "the curse of Lisp".