As with Lisp, you can bootstrap themselves with very few primitives.
Easier than SICP for Scheme and Intro to Symbolic Computation for Common Lisp.
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 :(
> Do schools even teach lisp these days ?
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.
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:
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.)
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.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited...
And, as always, AMA.
adityaathalye•3d ago
> 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.
tonyarkles•2h ago
Sadly we couldn’t convince it to work, even at 10 Mbit. My suspicion is salt water ingress into the vault. What we did manage to do, though… There were just enough tools installed on it that I could cross-compile zmodem at home, convert it to a hex file, upload the hex file by essentially just running cat > on the target, convert it back into a binary using… Perl I think? Or xxd? And then doing the daily data offload over zmodem every night instead of over TCP as was originally planned. It was a crazy weekend…
anthk•22m ago
potholereseller•1h ago
Here's some interesting quotes:
> during a task’s release of a lock, but before its actual release, the task may get interrupted by the daemon if the property gets broken. This means that the task terminates without releasing the lock. The error is particularly nasty in the sense that all code, except the lock releasing itself, had been protected against this situation: in case of an interrupt the lock releasing would be executed.
> The modeling effort, i.e. obtaining a PROMELA model from the LISP program, took about 12 man weeks during 6 calendar weeks, while the verification effort took about one week. ... The translation phase was non-trivial and time consuming due to the relative expressive power of LISP when compared with PROMELA.
> Java PathFinder (JPF) is a translator from a non-trivial subset of Java to PROMELA.
> The translator is written in 6000 lines of LISP, and was developed over a period of 8 months. JPF has been applied to a number of case studies, amongst them a 1500 line game server, a NASA file transfer protocol for satellites, and a NASA data transmission protocol for the space shuttle ground control.