Programming Languages 201713

  This essay analyze the George Orwell’s novel, nineteen eighty-four. Specially, Jem Berkes emphasizes the importance and the influence of the language.   The language is used very often by the politicians in order to mask the truth and mislead the population. That’s what we see in Orwell’s novel, how the government and media abuse of the repeated language and how it is used to manipulate people. Also, he criticizes that the people in the society unquestioningly obey the government without being capable to think and analyze the situations. Moreover, Jem said that the goal of the government, in Orwell’s novel, is to facilitate deception and manipulation that causes that people restrict their vision of the real world. Also, when people try to amplify their lexicon, the government prohibits and tries to turn back to the lexicon that government wants. As we see, the language has an important influence even in the way of thinking of the people. There is no som...

Over the time, the computer hardware, and thus, the programming languages have been evolving in order to make more robust software solutions. Although, there are some things that have changed, the overall idea is the same. For all programs, the idea is to read data from the memory and apply to them basic operations, and finally get the expected result from a cell of the memory. So, traditional programming is the most used today, though functional programming have been used by researchers for many years, it just starts to be popular. The reason is that functional and traditional programming are very different and programmers should learn and unlearn some concepts that don’t exist in the other one. But, functional programming let you to write more robust software and is easier to test. Moreover, it has advantages over imperative for concurrent and parallel programs. Basically, the functional programming consists in realize the computation by functions, as we see...

This time, the revenge of the nerds talks about the differences and the advantages of Lisp. Every programming language has its own features and that’s why it had been created. The author mentioned the “pointy-haired boss” who is a person that doesn’t know anything about technology, and for him every programming language is equivalent to another. In that way, this assertion is unreasonable because every programming language creation tries to solve a specific problematic, even some of them are extensions of another languages that includes improvements and fixes, like Java, which tries to fix and be better than C++. So, this fact makes that the assertion “all programming languages are equivalent” becomes contradictory. And it has sense, just wonder, why does someone bother himself to create a new programming language if it will be the same than the other? In the other hand, we can see that the pattern that newer languages have in common, like Java, Python and Perl, is that every time t...

Dick Gabriel has some mathematic and artificial intelligence degrees. Also, he has a LISP company. The podcast is an interview with Dick Gabriel that talks about the relation between LISP and artificial intelligence. He started describing briefly what LISP is. For Dick Gabriel, one of the principal characteristics of LISP is the use of lists and functions. Also, the program as data and data as program is another foundation of LISP. Later, he mentioned that the fact that user can define functions as it was built in the language is a great advantage of using LISP. Regarding artificial intelligence, he said that the artificial intelligence researchers want to write programs for specific tasks, so they want to find a language that could fit their needs. Then, using LISP let them design and build their own language, making an extension of LISP, in order to have a personalized language that covers all their needs. Moreover, another thing that makes LISP different is the ...