From: Adam Warner
Subject: Claim by Gabriel that NASA official attempted to block Lisp-based 1999 software of the year award?
Date:
Message-ID: <a8p2nv$u4krl$1@ID-105510.news.dfncis.de>
Hi all,
You may be aware of this penultimate paper in Richard Gabriel's Worse is
Better series:
http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper.pdf
In it this is claimed:
This second example is illustrative of a devastating point: It is not
simply that worse programming languages prevail through a reduction of
quality by the intersection effect, but the perpetuation of worse
programming languages, once they become popular, are argued for and
acted on stridently. All planning for running experiments and
autonomously navigating the Deep Space 1 probe is done using Common
Lisp code executing on the spacecraft. It is possible for controllers
to bring up a Lisp prompt on Earth and to debug and patch running code
somewhere in space. Last year, this Common Lisp code was selected by a
NASA panel for NASA s software of the year award. Despite this and
despite the fact that the software works well in space, one of the high
officials at NASA blocked the award and declared that it would not be
given unless the system were re-coded in C, in which language it would
be obviously better because . . . um, because . . . ?
Now I've come across this press release that the award was indeed issued:
http://www1.xanalys.com/PressReleases/XPress2.nsf/PressReleasesPublishedArchive/C43555E370AEDE3D802568E10057E426
And here is the web page where Remote Agent was indeed a co-winner of the
award:
http://icb.nasa.gov/swy99win.html
Can anyone enlighten me as to the events surrounding this? Was a co-winner
eventually named to appease this "high official"? Or was Gabriel
misinformed?
Thanks,
Adam
From: Peter Norvig
Subject: Re: Claim by Gabriel that NASA official attempted to block Lisp-based 1999 software of the year award?
Date:
Message-ID: <da69ff6a.0204080109.448375f@posting.google.com>
As I recall, the co-winners were named right from the start. There
was a challenge from a sore loser who shall remain nameless that
Remote Agent did not deserve to win. In part the challenge alledged
that it was a "prototype", not a real fielded system (although it was
flying on a spacecraft), and part of the evidence for it being a
prototype was that there was ongoing work for a port to C++. The fact
that it was written in Lisp was not really an issue. Rich Doyle and
others, including me, were able to answer the points in the challenge,
and it never really went anywhere.
-Peter Norvig
Adam Warner <······@consulting.net.nz> wrote in message news:<··············@ID-105510.news.dfncis.de>...
> Hi all,
>
> You may be aware of this penultimate paper in Richard Gabriel's Worse is
> Better series:
> http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper.pdf
>
> In it this is claimed:
>
> This second example is illustrative of a devastating point: It is not
> simply that worse programming languages prevail through a reduction of
> quality by the intersection effect, but the perpetuation of worse
> programming languages, once they become popular, are argued for and
> acted on stridently. All planning for running experiments and
> autonomously navigating the Deep Space 1 probe is done using Common
> Lisp code executing on the spacecraft. It is possible for controllers
> to bring up a Lisp prompt on Earth and to debug and patch running code
> somewhere in space. Last year, this Common Lisp code was selected by a
> NASA panel for NASA s software of the year award. Despite this and
> despite the fact that the software works well in space, one of the high
> officials at NASA blocked the award and declared that it would not be
> given unless the system were re-coded in C, in which language it would
> be obviously better because . . . um, because . . . ?
>
> Now I've come across this press release that the award was indeed issued:
> http://www1.xanalys.com/PressReleases/XPress2.nsf/PressReleasesPublishedArchive/C43555E370AEDE3D802568E10057E426
>
> And here is the web page where Remote Agent was indeed a co-winner of the
> award:
> http://icb.nasa.gov/swy99win.html
>
> Can anyone enlighten me as to the events surrounding this? Was a co-winner
> eventually named to appease this "high official"? Or was Gabriel
> misinformed?
>
> Thanks,
> Adam
From: Adam Warner
Subject: Re: Claim by Gabriel that NASA official attempted to block Lisp-based 1999 software of the year award?
Date:
Message-ID: <a8s431$uts89$1@ID-105510.news.dfncis.de>
Peter Norvig wrote:
> As I recall, the co-winners were named right from the start. There was
> a challenge from a sore loser who shall remain nameless that Remote
> Agent did not deserve to win. In part the challenge alledged that it was
> a "prototype", not a real fielded system (although it was flying on a
> spacecraft), and part of the evidence for it being a prototype was that
> there was ongoing work for a port to C++. The fact that it was written
> in Lisp was not really an issue. Rich Doyle and others, including me,
> were able to answer the points in the challenge, and it never really
> went anywhere.
Thanks Peter! Your explanation gives me a significantly different
intrepretation. The fact that the challenge was raised by someone who
missed out on winning the award indicates as you say that Lisp was not
really the issue.
Regards,
Adam Warner
From: David Cohen
Subject: Re: Claim by Gabriel that NASA official attempted to block Lisp-based 1999 software of the year award?
Date:
Message-ID: <2282daa3.0204091410.69c78519@posting.google.com>
Actually, I think that Richard Gabriel was, in fact, misinformed--but
not about the award, but rather about the Remote Agent's actual role
on
Deep Space 1. He says this in his piece:
> All planning for running experiments and
> autonomously navigating the Deep Space 1 probe is done using Common
> Lisp code executing on the spacecraft
While this may have been the intent originally, the RA, the Remote
Agent, was scaled back to become RAX, the Remote Agent eXperiment and
in that capacity it was only used experimentally for short periods of
time on the spacecraft.
You can read the official story about the results of running RAX here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/99/raxfollo4.html
The complete story of the Remote Agent would make for an interesting
read since there were all sorts of technical and non-technical issues
that arose. The Rashomon aspect would make it that much more
entertaining :-)
__
DC