On Apr 3, 1:53 am, Xah Lee <xah...@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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
