Programming Languages

First of all, this entry will talk about an article from Jem Berkes named  Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Nineteen Eighty-Four is a Gorge Orwell’s novel that talks about Winston, a person who lives in Oceania, a fake country governed by the Party, a group led by Big Brother. All the people who lives in Oceania have to live under the Party rules and statements. Basically, it manipulates everything: history present and past, the language (Newspeak) and also everything about people’s lives. The article I mentioned above describes how, in this case the Party, uses the language to manipulate everything. This was really interesting for me, because, as the author mentioned, changing the language was the main weapon to manipulate people. Newspeak is a language molded to reduce people’s capability to express themselves, so that they will finally think as the Party want them to. Also, this weapon is combined with the constantly changing of events in history, leadi

In this entry I will talk about an article by Paul Graham titled  The Roots of Lisp . It talks about another article by John McCarthy published in 1960 in which he explained how a whole programming language can be built using simple operators and a notation of functions. This share is well known as Lisp (A curious fact that I didn´t know is that Lisp’s name comes from “List-Processing”), which basis is just using a simple data structure (lists) for coding and data. I found interesting where the author mentions that there are really two clean consistent models of programming so far: C and Lisp model. The majority had followed the C model, but, bit by bit, they are getting closer to the Lisp model. In order to present a cleaner and better understandable article, the author converted McCarthy’s mathematical explanation steps into running common Lisp code. What really caught my attention and surprised myself is the  eval function. This function may work as an interpreter for Lisp, i

In this entry I’m going to talk about an article by Konrad Hinsen. It is titled as “The Promises of Functional Programming”. This article talks about the advantages of moving to functional programming (they’re more robust, compact easy parallelizable). But what is functional programming? Functional programming is a way of programming using mathematical functions avoiding mutable data and changes of states. What principally characterize functional programming is that it is composed by functions, as I already said, of mathematical type or in mathematical context. This means that a function will always produce the same output when given the same input. Since there are no side effects, variables are not modified, and they aren’t required. This aspect surprised me because in all the programming languages that I’m familiarized with, variables are part of their fundamentals. But this is just the beginning, another fundamental aspect of functional programming that can be interpreted as a