The Revenge of the Nerds : Part 2 Big companies are always a big factor when creating something new , usually it is because they have something that small companies doesn't. A big amount of money they can invest on new products and sell them with a lower prices than their smaller competitors. So is easy to see why is hard to compete against these big companies. Yet i believe there is something happening in the computer world that is helping companies be able to compete against these titans. The development of new products of software and hardware is extremely fast. This is the case with IBM and Microsoft during the big boom of personal computers. IBM had such heavy process to create a new product that will be impossible to compete with Apple in such short time. Yet they were able to do it by just skipping these procedures and finding parts that were easy to assemble in a short amount of time. A big alliance was formed and yet again it was based on how fast Microsoft was able to ...
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1984 This is the chilling story about a dystopian world and how it affects the people who live in this world. Is the most famous novel that talks about on how the government can control its people and deprive its population of any thought. Now a curious thing about the way they try to control people is by limiting the language they speak. By just having a population that can only talk in the most basic of English they would be able to destroy thought in a way. People won't be able to create new ideas because their language is limited to the most basic functions. Even the idea of communication can also disappear because although we are exchanging words between us, these won't have any substance to our feelings or thoughts. It will be just a language of agreement and disagreement and nothing else. Now, this sounds scary and it is just a novel but the point of these is that we must know the importance of education for our society. We usually undermine studies and language overa...
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The Root of LISP This talks about the first papers talking about LISP from John McCarthy now we see the beginning of LISP. The curious thing about this as with everything related to mathematics is that a lot of things related to Lisp were a discovery instead of a creation. Now another important aspect from reading is how the author divides languages into two paradigms which is C and Lisp. This meaning between the classical way of programming and functional programming. Yet something certainly true where we find out that more and more languages will decide to integrate both ways of programming. Functional programming is extremely effective in some cases and classical programming beats functional programming in others. That is why programmers have to get used to both ways of programming and be able to distinguish in which case is the best solution for a problem. That is why Clojure, Scala and other languages have become such a big thing at the moment. Encouraging people to learn f...
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The Promise of Functional Programming The lecture is quite straightforward and talks about a topic we have talked about during these couple of weeks which is Functional Programming. Now one of the points of this article is on how functional programming differs on traditional programming. To start with we have a change of paradigm which is the use of variables.This is a major change for anyone who has programmed for a while and this is because usually we use variables for anything. Now in this case we will use immutable which is a value that it will never change. Then the second thing that shocks any programmer are loops. In functional programming we only depend on recursion which is a topic that any programmer knows but is afraid of. The possibility of creating an infinite loop is always present and without practice is easy to make mistakes and making programs extremely inefficient. Yet with the right optimization and using it in the adequate moments the program can be extremel...
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The Revenge of The Nerds This documentary talks about the tycoons of computers and how they started their companies. This is the most interesting part of how the personal computer was created. Normally someone would think the computer was created by people how had a clear purpose on solving the problems that we had at that time. Yet that is not the case. Wozniak one of the founders of apple his main idea for building a computer was just to see what he was able to do with the circuits he had from a computer set. In the homebrew club that is where he was able to show to everyone what he was able to do with his own computer. People were impressed and wanted to know more about it. Steve Jobs was the person who was behind the idea of the business and saw the opportunity this new invitation could be of interest to a lot of people. The genius of an engineer and the vision of a business man caused that one of the computer behemoths was born Yet not everyone who was interested on solving...
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Clojure This is an interesting interview cause we see several aspects that Clojure has and how it works in a lower level. Now we are introduced with a question that all the people that know about LISP or Clojure have heard about. Which is why even if this is such a great language is not more commonly used in companies or in the mainstream media of programming. The answer of Rich Hickey I think is quite accurate. This is not an "Easy" language more an accurate word would be familiar language. Where we can see the steps a program takes to solve a task as we usually we will see in Java or C. Now this is true in so many levels when Lambdas were introduced to different languages for example Java the creators would defend lambdas as a better solution to some problems. Yet the public some people didn't like this situation. Thinking it was a solution that require more steps just to solve the problem. The issue it was that it didn't look to the data structure or commands we...
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Revenge of The Nerds In the article of Revenge of the Nerds we have a classic example on how mathematics is closely related to computers and this is the case with LISP. Now Lisp was invented in 1950 but is still really relevant in a lot of areas in the computer community. The reason it was caused it was based more in mathematics than on functionality in comparison to other languages. Mathematics is considered timeless , and is true we can look at any formula and the time it was discovered and we will see the importance of it at in some field of study. Therefore even thought LISP was created in a era where computers were still considered something new and we can get the computational power of one in a wristwatch as the writer put's it. Yet LISP is being an amazing contribution to programming languages, for example without it we wouldn't be able to have Lambdas in Java or in C# to extremely common languages for web applications. So we can see the advantage of using math to cre...