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 was developed with a math focus. "The Lisp embodied nine new ideas” are interesting, but these two specific ideas caught my attention. First, I didn’t know that Lisp was the first language that supported recursion, this is something amazing because nowadays recursion is one of the more powerful characteristics of the Programming languages, and how the programs in Lisp can be read, compile or run at the same time, programming languages like Java or C++ function different and have an specific way to be executed, and is funny that this was implemented by accident, anyway, how Lisp works is truly interesting and it would be wonderful to learn a little bit more about this. To develop non-critical programs (glue programs) it’s not necessary to consider the selection of a programming language as a very important activity. “what industry best practices gets you is not the best, but merely the average”. I think this is important, something that anyone that wants to be different at the industry and mark a difference, needs to take in count, specially because at IT we don’t want to get or develop what the average industry does, we need to innovate.

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