The Semicolon Wars

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, the main point in the reading is to expose the how the different languages ​​offer different ways to write algorithms to do the same thing, this is an interesting difference between math and computing.

Finally, I agree with the author, I consider there are some better programming languages ​​than others, but there are languages ​​that have a specific and advantageous approach to solve certain types of problems, this is why is highly recommended to learn how to program in other languages ​​(learn how to manage their semantic and declare variables). All of us have a favorite language and a favorite IDE to work, but we have to remember that the languages ​​may get obsolete and as an engineer we need to be able to embrace change and adapt to the new IDEs and languages, no matter in what technology field are we involved in.

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

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 wa...
Leer más

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 ...
Leer más

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, ...
Leer más