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Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

For many things you won't even know that it is written in some kind of Lisp.

* the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline. Plus it took care that the troops were at the right place.

* the missions of various Telescopes, especially the Hubble Space Telescope are planned with a Lisp-based planner

* American Express has been checking complex business card transactions with a Lisp-based rule system

* many cars (Ford, Jaguar, ...) were designed using a Lisp-based design software developed by Evans & Sutherland

* turbines for various airplanes were designed in Lisp (Boeing, Airbus, ...)

Some of that stuff survived. Some not.

But still today, if you see product descriptions like this, you would not suspect that it is written mainly in Lisp, but it is:

http://www.ptc.com/product/creo-elements-direct/modeling/

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>the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline.

Really? Because IIRC it was won because it was fought by superpower against a small country with 1/1000 the military resources.

I'm not talking politics in this comment. What I mean to say is it's another thing to say "Lisp was used in that system" and totally another to say "the war was won because of it".

There is a big possibility that there was absolutely no correlation between what that language that system was written on and the war being won (and is far more likely, anyway: wars have been won, before and after, without Lisp).

Lot's of NASA missions use plain old C and do just fine. Should we say that they succeeded "because of" C?

Basically they had to wait for the Iraq invasion until the Lisp software was ready.

> Because IIRC it was won because it was fought by superpower against a small country with 1/1000 the military resources.

The Lisp software moved the 1000* military resources to Iraq.

Software does not move tanks. It's one part of an overall system that moves tanks. You over-reached on that point; it happens.

Software moves fleets. Coordinates ten of thousands flights. Make sure that hundred thousands soldiers have supplies.

It's called logistics.

It's a new world.

It happened.

It's been said that this single piece of software paid back for all DoD AI research.

Just because supposedly a piece of software performing a critical purpose was written in lisp does not mean lisp won the war.

If the software wasn't written in lisp, it would have been written in any other language.

And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead.

Did the software help? Probably. It's likely there would have been more screw ups if there was no software. But it takes a big leap to credit the software with winning the war.

But there was no other software. It was a logistics system written in Lisp which moved fleets, troops and supplies.

It was based on a decade of research in various planning software written in Lisp.

> And if the software wasn't written at all there would have been hundreds of people doing the software's work manually instead.

How so? How should it work to move hundred thousands of people with hundreds of thousands different types of things between several continents? In a few months?

  the first Gulf War in Iraq was won because a Lisp application took care that US soldiers had everything from toilet paper, ammunition to gasoline

The word because means that if there was no Lisp application the war would not have been won. This is almost certainly false, even if the Lisp application did make things easier.

without that application, nobody would have been there.

Without that application, there would have been another.

It wasn't.

That "it wasn't" doesn't mean that "it could not have been" (which was the point the other guy made).

This is more than an elementary logical mistake on your part, this is pure crazy.

By the same logic all those COBOL and Java applications that are deployed for something major (from banking to taxation to multi-national logistics) prove that COBOL and Java are as good as Lisp (and irreplaceable at that, seeing that "there wasn't something else deployed in their place").

What app was used in ONE war doesn't matter at all to explain which language is better than another.

Lots of far more crucial operation than the logistics in a minor war held by a superpower to a small third world country, used other languages. For example, NASA missions used assembly and C.

Does that prove anything relate to the suitability of those languages in general?

Quit the BS Lisp-proselytisation with bogus arguments and hand-waiving.

Well, if you go as far as to say that without Lisp nobody would have been there... Is it fair to say that Lisp started the war?

"Thisp aggression will not stand."

LOL! "Coalition for Peace Against LISP".

  > How should it work to move hundred thousands of people
  > with hundreds of thousands different types of things
  > between several continents? In a few months?

Have you considered reading a WWII history book? That was a far more impressive and substantial mobilization to multiple countries spanning multiple continents which was done without the benefit of software. It took more than a few months largely because they had to manufacture equipment and recruit/train personnel from scratch.

Either you're doing one epic troll or you're displaying a staggering ignorance of the ability for militaries going back to the time of the Roman Empire to do significant mobilizations.

May I propose the alternative explanation that you are overstating the case for Lisp and this software, because you just happen to like Lisp? I mean, look at your HN alias.

That particular software could have been written in any bloody language. Logistics is one of the more boring areas of software engineering anyway -- and the majority of it in the world runs in Cobol, Java and similar boring languages, just like most of the banking world runs.

Plus, it's not like the US army haven't made a mess with war logistics. How much did the Iraq war cost to the country again?

In 1991 there was no Java to write an AI-based planning system for military logistics.

You may want to read what the software actually did and how it was developed. That would clear things up a bit for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning...

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