Programming Languages

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...

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...

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...

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...