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Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The second part of the film is also interesting, this part explores at first how IBM realized that there was a new market rising, the market, of the personal computers. This part explains how IBM realized that they may lost all this rising and valuable market if they didn’t quickly develop a product to compete with Apple and the other little personal computer manufacturers. So, they decided to take advantage of their resources and bought as many as possible components to construct a computer, but they still had another problem, the Operating System. IBM decided to make a kind of outsourcing hiring Microsoft to develop this OS, but they weren’t their first option, at first, they tried to hire and bought another OS, but for some inconvenient they ended hiring Microsoft and earning the rights for the programming language that Microsoft (Bill Gates) developed, and, they obtained their OS.  It was a matter of time for Microsoft to realize that the business relationship with IBM was ve
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The Roots Of Lisp

The article tries to explain us, as the previous readings the advantages of Lisp over other programming languages. The author explains how Lisp was created, the “idea behind the development of Lisp”. Also, the author argues how and why it’s so different to program in Lisp than in other languages.  The author, divides the types of programming in two different fields, and puts as their principal exponents C and Lisp. He defines the C model as the most popular model, but he also argues that this kind of languages and their development hasn’t been evolving fast enough. It uses the example of the garbage collector to support this. In other hand, the author expose how Lisp have certain advantages as the capability to write programs to write another program. Later the reading explores more the similarities between Lisp and Clojure (operators) and functions.  The reading exposes how most of the functions and functionality of Lisp are still used by other languages, and this means that the
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The promises of functional programming

The article starts exposing in certain way how are related the advances in hardware and the advances in software, explaining that the development of more powerful hardware permits the development of more complex software. Regardless of the easier way to implement and run imperative code, the advantages of functional code and his capability of concurrent and parallel programming, keep this coding technique’s fame. Also, the easier way to test this kind of code help too. The fundamental principle of functional programming is explained as “the mapping from input values to output values”, and is important to understand this, to understand the next explanation, the functional programming doesn’t work with variables, it works with functions, functions that aren’t supposed to change variables, and doesn’t have side effects. The functional programming considers functions as data, this means that we have functions that call functions or return functions as parameters. The promise of the fu
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Triumph of the Nerds Part I

The film’s topic is interesting, I saw  another film about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the origin of their business before. Something I didn’t know, was what have been the first “personal computer” and who made it, I used to think that it was created by Apple, now I know it started as a “computer kit”, and that it wasnt designed by Microsoft or Apple. I was surprised with this, how this kit was sold regardless his incapability to do something useful, I think this is surprising because this means that two facts were properly exploited, the business model and the curiosity about the computing stuff.  Something I admire about the people that started to create, innovate and research about computation is that most them started at their garages, they weren’t privileged people, they were just regular students that wanted to make more accessible the tech to the ordinary people. As they said, they didn’t start for money, they were expected to lose it instead of winning money, but they took
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Rich Hickey on Clojure

Clojure’s design is to be hosted, this caught my attention, because as it was explained at the previous podcast, the Yahoo Store was designed in Lisp, so, this makes of Clojure a good option to develop embed systems as I see. Lisp’s compiler doesn’t compile text, it compiles data structures, I still didn’t understand how Clojure can compile, read or execute code at the “same time” but it seems that the work with data structures is the key to make this posible. In Clojure, programming and metaprogramming are the same thing.  Macros in Clojure and Lisp are simple data structure processing code, is interesting this way to explain how to “write programs that later will write another program”. “Programming in large is a collective activity, it involves people, libraries, and it’s important to be able to interact with what other people have do in other languages”, this idea is especially interesting, due to the fact that is true, nowadays there are no just one programming language, ther
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Revenge of the Nerds

The pointy-haired boss assumption about what language to use exposed at the beginning of the lecture is funny because it’s true, most bosses that don’t know anything about technology will make assumptions that in most of cases would be wrong, this due to the knowledge about business that they have and the lack of knowledge about tech. At my class of “TI projects administration” last semester, we studied some critical points that may cause a project to fail, and one of them was the inability of a boss to understand the impact of the TI area.  The idea about the “programming languages being the same” is discarded with the explanation given about how there are different languages with certain advantages to attack some specific problems, this idea has been present through the lectures. “Lisp and Fortran were the trunks of two separate evolutionary trees”, this idea serves as support to the idea about programming languages with advantages to attack specific problems, in this case, Fortran
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Dick Gabriel on Lisp

At the beginning, Dick told us his background, and it surprised to me, that he said he have some mathematical degrees and one in artificial intelligence, because last semester at my algorithm’s analysis class our professor Salvador E. Venegas said us that something beneficial for an engineer was, to “get the full package”, because there was always engineers that need to study mathematics in order to advance in their jobs, because the understanding of mathematics reduced the complexity of developing algorithms. I didn’t know Lisp has an interpreter instead of a compiler, something interesting because as I know it reads and traduce the program line per line, instead like the hole program first, as the compiler do. I didn’t understand well how the meta part of “eval” work, what I understood was that “eval” work in certain way as recursion. The “common Lisp” is interesting, how Lisp started to get “subdivisions” in different ways to get closer to user’s needs gave Lisp variety and trying
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