Programming Languages

The Secret History of Women in Coding I'm pretty amazed with this article, it made me notice how women were like experts in those early days of computers, even though on pictures, films and recordings there was always that image of a group of women working on whatever computer they were working on I never really noticed or reacted to the fact that, indeed, most of the teams that really worked with this computers were made of girls, old and young, but to see a man doing this kind of stuff I can't recall to see one. One of the things that has always been characteristic with men is the ego and superiority, and the damage from this way of thinking hasn't healed to this day even with all this movements and protests (which, from my point of view just get things worse). Even today, there are places were women are considered less capable than men on computing and programming and that's something that must change completely. I sincerely don't like all the protests for ...

The Roots of Lisp Lisp as the main root of functional languages has a rather confusing way of working, it is as basic as it can be so to write a function without the need for it to be complex can quite confusing like the eval functions presented on the document. Is funny that on this paper I read about interpreters and on my SW Design and Architecture I also learn about interpreters. I have to thank that newer and improved versions of Lisp have emerged like Clojure that make simple to write functions that are interpreted into all this complex code that was explained just to do something relatively simple. Enough from complaining about, on the bright side, the benefits from having a simple and basic language is that it can be molded to whatever we want from the ground up (basically like how Clojure or any "upgraded" version of any language came to be) and that is why Lisp is still being so functional and useful even today. The simple notation that Lisp uses is what giv...

Pair Programming It results outstanding to me that the idea of having a pair or a group of programmers working on the same computer is relatively new to the programming world, the phrase of "two heads are better than one" has been existing from a long time ago prior to computation and it is has been proven to work (also it is quite logical), so why pair programming hasn't shine as it's supposed to be? The only thing that disturbs pair programming is the human factor, humans change their mind but at the same time don't, if they have worked all their lives alone and the results have been good the change to a pair programming will be difficult, they'll think that they are superior than their comrade, the suggestions of the last one will be ignored mostly, no help will be asked, making the pair programming more of a hassle than a good programming method. Other thing that involves the human factor is the interaction with others, maybe we can get along with so...

Rich Hickey on Clojure Clojure and his ability to easily communicate with Java makes it the perfect contender for best language, being able to simply call Java code con Clojure code and looking that they work without trouble at start is something that is rarely seen but that when it does appear, is like when God decides to touch you with all his greatness. Programmers and enterprises have noticed this, that's why Clojure is one of the most well-paid languages on USA. Inheriting from LISP the investigation-oriented theme makes a language that cannot be managed by anyone but when mastered, it really shows its true potential, sadly this isn't enough for making LISP, Clojure or the functional programming in general a popular thing, although Clojure with its JVM implementation and macros seeks to fight the problems that stopped LISP from getting mainstream. Thanks to functions that Clojure has, it makes it way easier and direct to solve problems and to actually combine or to...

Dick Gabriel on Lisp Lisp, as the language that introduced a new kind of programming, opened a new window of opportunities, it had another vision, another way for doing everything that other languages do and with this different vision there were things that were considered difficult or weren't even thought of came to be a close reality. The function-based system that Lisp uses is capable to keep building itself based on the needs of the programmer, this is particularly useful, basically you could have your own language for each task that you have, everything based on Lisp. Considering that Lisp is free from some restrains of other languages like types, is relatively easier to build ones own language or if we want to avoid the hustle, to build macros that simply return what they have to based on what they receive and the environment they are running. Basically, every functional programming language grew from Lisp, showing how easy and flexible it was to develop and to "...

The Promises of Functional Programming Functional programming, although existing for quite some time now, haven´t grown up as much as the other languages (imperative and object-oriented) so to start learning a functional language when all your life has been around the other two languages can be confusing and difficult. The differences are evident from the beginning, the syntax in Clojure for example, with all those parentheses, are frustrating to handle in the beginning, however, this text shows the benefits that the functional programming has and that make it worth to learn a new language with a completely different "way" of coding. The main advantage that I agree with the reading is the benefits of concurrency and parallelism, functional programming doesn't use variables, so the main problems with these two things can be, in theory, be solved easily or avoided, however, like I said at the beginning of this entry, functional programming isn't as mature and dev...