Programming Languages Blog

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...

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 t...

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, ...

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, Fort...