Programming Languages Blog

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 ...

“Learn Lisp, just because it would make you a better programmer, this regardless if you want to program in Lisp later or not”. This is an interesting argue, because, the essay told us that learning Lisp is like learning Latin, it may not be a very useful skill at first, but it would help you to develop another skill, in the case of Latin, the essay’s told us that it would help us to learn English or other languages easily. The same idea applies to Lisp. It´s also interesting, how the author describes his work with the “first” web-based application. Also, the authors point of view and experience with startups is interesting, the reason why they selected Lisp for his project and how that allowed him and his partner to take advantage of their competitors with quick development with Lisp is amazing. Later, the author explains how programmers tend to keep working with some specific languages, and they don’t even think to change that language, it doesn’t mind if other languages offer anothe...

The analogy between the spoken languages ​​around the world and the need to know at least a basic expression and the need to know how to print "hello world" in different programming languages ​​is interesting. And it turns more interesting through the reading, it's true that there are a lot of programming languages ​​and all have differences. In my personal experience the two more "problematic" differences have been the semantic and the declaration of variables, but I think its just a matter of practice to "solve" this kind of problems, because these facts may change but the logic of programming to everyone is always the same.  The reading stablishes that "the programming languages ​​are built on the same kind of grammatical scaffold, called a contex-free grammar," as I said I think a programmer just need to practice. Another interesting point is how the author compares the program writing with the derivates writing, because its true, th...

Hi, my name is Ricardo: I study ISC, now I'm at 6th semester, I like videogames, specially the shooters and sandbox genders, I like reading dramas and sci-fi books, also, I play basketball and football ocassionally, I also like to go out to parties, cinema, eating wiht my friends or my girlfriend. I expect to learn how to program in Clojure and improve my programming skills.