You'll all be ROTF after my story involving LISP, an AI language.
After spending time using Python scripts at Honeywell to automate engine testing, management took notice of how much money I was saving them.
The department head promoted me and put me on a special project.
Honeywell Aerospace had to deal with an upcoming merger with GE, which was taking engineers away from thier bread and butter customers who needed FAA documentation certifying thier engine controller designs.
They were using a CASE tool called BEACON to design the C++ scaffolding for the engine controller signals processing.
BEACON was a vendor lock-in solution with no report generation. My admin told me the code files were stored in a proprietary format that they sent thier best engineers against to reverse engineer and they bounced. Could I take a look at the problem?
I examined what the engineers were doing. They tried Python to scan the data files ( which were legible text by the way thank gawd) using regular expressions for pattern matching. The engineer handing this off to me said this approach failed miserably.
Guess what the BEACON data files were written as? S-Exprs!
It was only my AI coursework using LISP that made me see the problem in a way others couldn't. And that's how I saved Honeywell Aerospace more that $1M in a two year period writing an External Graphics Generation System to go with the BEACON.
The same S-Expr parser library I wrote for Python 2.5 also does quite fine with Rational Rose data files for report generation, too.
In 2005, the EU overruled the merger with GE, leaving Honeywell Aerospace hemorrhaging money, and then a greenmailer named Dave Cote became chairman of the board and started swinging his meat axe at "rogue" R&D projects. I was left with literally nothing to do but stare at my screen for three months since they wanted to get rid of me but had no cause. I held out for the eventual mass buyout offer, but this broke me as an engineer after so much rejection in prior employment.
No good deed ever goes unpunished. But I had the time of my life, and regained enough confidence to remarry and have a baby girl who still loves me after growing up under a father whose ex fell out of love with him for losing confidence in himself for becoming unemployable.
It turned out later, that I had spent the majority of my life with undiagnosed autism. Both of my managers (James Behnke and Brian Sellner) are refusing to provide recommendations and so I have become unemployable as a software designer. After three years of being considered unemployable because of this discriminatory treatment, I signed on to Social Security Disability Insurance in 2008.
I eventually got my autism diagnosis in 2023 via Vocational Rehabilitation. Not that it is very much help today, because I have now been unemployed for 20 years.
But still, here is the proof on the Python.org website, complete with a Return On Investment analysis showing I indeed saved Honeywell more than a million dollars in avoided labor costs.