Revenge of the Nerds

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 they are more like Lisp. But, how can a programming language that had been created in 1958 be relevant nowadays? That’s because Lisp wasn’t planned to be a programming language and in its beginnings its creator try to prove that Lisp was neater than Turing Machines and it is based on math.  So, we can highlight several things that make Lisp different:
·      Conditionals
·      Function type
·      Recursion
·      Dynamic typing
·      Garbage Collection
·      Expressions
·      Symbols

Therefore, we can figure out that some of this Lisp features are in newer programming languages, like Java and its garbage collector. Finally, as the others readings, this article stand out that Lisp is a powerful tool that allows you to write complex programs with simpler code. Moreover, the fact that you can use it and personalize the functions and the syntax of it, make it even more powerful.

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