Reading an interview with Jack Crenshaw after 20 years.

This post gained accidentally massive significance yesterday, as we have witnessed a Moon landing by India, and we'll likely watch Indian astronauts walking on the moon surface in a few years' time.

But let's start from the beginning, how I got to read the Interview with Jack Crenshaw on the website called Resonance Pub in 2001, what it meant to me in that time. And why I decided to return to the interview after 22 years and describe my feelings, what does it mean to me nowadays and how other people could benefit from my experience.

In 2000, I started a new job in deCODE Genetics in Iceland and around 2001 I was tasked to write an interpreter for new data mining language called SDL – Set Definition Language. While I was preparing for this new exciting project, I came across a fifteen part series called “Let's Build a Compiler, by Jack Crenshaw”. This blog is a seminal work helping new entrants to the complicated field of compilers and interpreters. As it happens, I didn't stop there and found the interview with Jack Crenshaw and read it. Like everybody in the East, we had our space heroes-s from the Soviet Union, so we did not know so much about the Apollo program, apart from real basics. Obviously, the Moon landing information was not banned in my youth time, but obviously things coming from the Western world were considered to be evaluated by the careful eye of censors. So it is 2001, and I'm reading about the Moon landing and the people behind it and thinking, what sort of great atmosphere it had to be there and contribute to the success of the team. I think that synergy between great individuals and a team effort inspired me very much at that time. Let's now quote from the interview:

Resonance: At the beginning of the Apollo program, where did you think we would be by the year 2000, lunar cities? Martian cities?

Crenshaw: Absolutely – all of the above. At the time Apollo was well along, it was tacitly assumed that we’d press right on to Mars. The trajectories were already designed, as was the booster, NASA’s Nova. It never occurred to us that the beginning was also the end. We never anticipated the Vietnam war, the Beat Generation, Flower Children, and the anti-science backlash.

I recall, in history class, reading about the huge gap – over a century – between Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492, and the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, in 1610. I could never understand the reasoning. Having discovered such a vast and rich natural resource, why would people wait a century to use it? Now, in hindsight, I guess I understand: Priorities change. If anybody had told me, back around 1964, that we’d have a similar hiatus after Apollo, I would have thought them completely mad.

Resonance: We are now 30 years past the Armstrong-Aldrin moonwalks of 1969. What feelings do you have when you view the films of the Apollo astronauts walking on the Moon?

Crenshaw: Mostly sadness. It seems to me such a terrible waste. The Apollo launch complexes, built at such huge costs, sit on Cape Canaveral, slowly decaying back into dirt. Our abilities to repeat the feat get worse with every passing year. Worst of all, all that incredible effort, all that hard-earned knowledge, all those careers spent learning the skills, all those marriages, careers, and even lives sacrificed for the goal to make Apollo a success, are mostly gone. Most of us who worked on Apollo are either dead, retired, or senile now. The knowledge is gone, possibly forever. I’m one of the lucky ones; I was young enough when Apollo began to still be able to remember how to do it. Even so, too few remain who do. If, today, we were given another Presidential mandate to return to the Moon in another eight years, I don’t think we’d have a snowball’s chance in Hell of doing it. Even if we simply tried to build another Apollo/Saturn V system, with no changes at all, I still don’t think we could do it. Apollo brought together thousands of the country’s best minds, all concentrating on a single goal. It’s the kind of thing that comes along only rarely in history.

This is just a small snippet from a larger text.

So around 2003, the SDL project was completed, I've changed my priorities – something similar to what Jack said in the interview. The priorities changed again back in 2004 – 2008 and a few times since. But it is fair to say that perhaps my goal staid the same – get to the bottom, how to write a robust and easy maintainable code, in other words, to elevate my professional skills. And it is not an easy journey.

I somehow kept this interview in my mind, I don't know why. There are some situations, meetings, talks, which have a profound effect on you, whether it is personal or professional life. I think that the amount of such events is really finite, and it can be counted on fingers.

As a usual law of procrastination goes, I was thinking to make this post a few weeks ago. But it was never the right time, but when we watched the Indian module Moon landing, I thought to get back to it.

Now it is the end of Summer 2023, and I'm thinking how this article is shaping my overall life goals still. I've done a big effort to strengthen my programming skills over the years of contracting since 2007 until 2022. I worked on a few projects, some of them were successful in terms of user adoption, some of them have one internal customer and some of them are just a pile of dead files kept in corporate source code repositories. Nobody reads them and nobody utilizes any hard gained knowledge in the projects. Priorities simply change.

And I think this is that hidden gem in the article, at least that is that one fact, which kept it in my mind. The priorities change, but the values stay the same.

And if you can keep your professional goal (or shall we say values?) The same over the years, you'll find the right set of priorities for the given period. And I think this clarity is something, which we as Western culture have lost. We have compromised on our values in past decades.

But does it really affect me as an individual and entrepreneur?

It does and it doesn't. You just need to be stronger on your goals, beliefs and actions, and accommodate and use hard gained knowledge. Not to forget it, not to overrate it. Just use it.

So this is my take on the interview, I read around 2001, now at the end of Summer 2023. You'll find the link to the interview at the end of the article;

2 questions may arise based on this article:

• How are your professional goals and values kept in difficult times??
• Are you looking forward to the next horizons of Space exploration?

References:

1. https://www.resonancepub.com/jack-crenshaw/
2. https://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/