The Remote Agent Experiment: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away

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dmit · 2012-08 · Recommendation

Related Google Tech Talk: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away [VIDEO] Ron Garret talks about DS1, a project in the 90s where a small team used Lisp to send an autonomous craft into space in a third of the time and at a fraction of the cost of previous comparable projects. (Yes, I couldn't have made up a more HN-friendly story if I tried.)

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iLemming · 2024-06 · Reference

It's actually not that hard to explain, yet without experiencing it firsthand, it is hard to see what this REPL fuzz is about. So, let's take a minimal, simple example: if True: print("Hello, Python!") and the equivalent code in Clojure: (when true (println "Hello, Clojure!")) In Clojure, you can send any expression fragment like a single symbol, list or even incomplete code and it will be evaluated according to its context. So, you can sent `true`, you can send `println` and you can even send `(when true println)` or `(when true (println))`, or even `(when true ,,,, (println))` (you can replace commas with line breaks if you want) and it will still be evaluated. In Python, you can send `True`, and you can send `print`, but you can't send `if True: print` (even with corrected indentation), because Reader would have hard time making sense of that. In Python, you need to adhere strictly to its syntax, and partial expressions that don't form a complete statement won't be evaluated meaningfully. In contrast, Clojure's REPL can work seamlessly with code fragments because the underlying representation of code is just data structures that are always valid within the REPL context. What makes it mind-blowingly cool is that you can send these expressions to a remote REPL without any transformation, serialization, or encoding, because it's not just code — it is data. In fact, some teams do just that. They'll keep an open socket on a running app, possibly performing somewhere in the clou

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_emacsomancer_ · 2024-04 · Reference

I'm reminded of Ron Garrett's writing/talks on remote debugging the Remote Agent for the New Millennium Deep Space 1 (DS1).[0], [1] [0]: The Remote Agent Experiment: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away - [VIDEO] [1]: NASA Programmer Remembers Debugging Lisp in Deep Space - [LINK]

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