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Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The second part of the documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” focuses on the differences between what were the old companies, mainly IBM or Big Blue as they called it, to new companies like Microsoft or Apple. Mainly the way Big Blue is a lot more strict, has a lot of customs and rules, compared to Microsoft or Apple which were companies whose leaders didn’t have a strict dress code or strict written in stone working hours. We also see how computers were still not ready to be the wonder machines they are today, Big Blue saw them as unnecessary machines. Once Big Blue started creating personal computers, they needed someone to create for them, they had the hardware, but without the software, it was useless. And that is where Bill Gates comes in, creating the operating system for the IBM computers. What Big Blue did not predict, was that that young boy they hired to make their operating system, would be one of the most influential people in our current era, or how him and another called ...
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Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

We all know that language both written and spoken is one of the greatest advances of mankind, and so it is a power that should be used correctly. In the novel of 1984, we see a clear example of this, within the book we se that the language spoken in it, “Newspeak,” is controlled by the tyrannical government shown in the book. Sometimes words get forgotten, but other times, they are stolen. In this case newspeak had fewer and fewer words that could be used to start a revolution and to keep things going exactly the way their tyrannical government wanted them to. By shortening the words in newspeak, it narrows the way people think and reduces their memory capacity, so now the government has all the power and instead of thinking, people dedicate their time to other things while the government keeps shortening the language and reducing their memory. By reducing the memory of their citizens, the country is able to stay on its tracks, while people forget everything that has happened befor...
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The Roots of Lisp

In “ The Roots of Lisp” we see a very in depth and specific description of how the lisp language came to be, explaining how John McCarthy created a “list processing” language that used structures called lists for both the data and the code of a program. This way of processing data is not just something that stayed in the past but something that paves the way programming is going at the moment. With better and more powerful computers, we can see why this programming structure is becoming more common. The article continues giving us the seven primitive operators of Lisp. The seven primitive operators are quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons, and cond, these form the base of Lisp. “quote” returning whatever arguments are given after it, “atom” returning “t” if the argument is an atom or an empty list and returning () otherwise; in Lisp the “t” represents truth and () represents false, “eq” returns “t” if the values of the arguments given are equal and () otherwise, “car” returns the first ...
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The Promises of Functional Programming

Like we have previously discussed the IT field evolves rapidly, and as it does, so does the way to write software evolves with it. While this is true, it is also true that the way software is made has the same bases as it did at the beginning. The software modifies the data in the computer’s internal memory, and by using basic mathematical operations, it reaches the result specified by the orders given to the computer and writes it in a memory cell. This is a case of “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” so the way it works is not given much thought. Even if the traditional method is the best know, that doesn’t mean it’s the only one, functional programing is a different approach to this. And even if this method has been researched for a long time, it is barely beginning to be used in real life program applications. One example many people are familiar with would be Mathematica, which uses functional programing, even if its not used for very complex programs. Clojure is used as anoth...
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Triumph of the Nerds Part I

The triumph of the nerds is a really interesting documentary about the rise of the computer culture we know today that went from being something only a few knew about and used, to a multimillion dollar business that has expanded all over the globe to almost every household. We see how everything started from a few students messing around with devices that, while they didn’t know exactly what it did, they were determined to figure out a way to use them. And that’s what they did, they learned to use the Altair, something that seems to simple for us now like turning on a little lightbulb was revolutionary for the computer club. To the big companies like IBM that had been making computers for a long time it seemed incredible, almost impossible, that in the near future, many people would be interested in having their very own personal computer, so they missed a big chance to be the pioneers in the personal computer business. Instead, young figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started ...
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Rich Hickey on Clojure

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Revenge of the Nerds

  As a programmer, this is a very interesting article where the author explores the different pros and cons of using a certain programming language, viewing it from a different perspective of someone of the IT field , instead, showing us a perspective of someone that believes all programming languages to be created equal, the pointy haired boss. Many times, when we were beginner programmers, we believed that the language we are most comfortable with is the best, and that other languages are wrong and are not useful for whatever task we are assigned. Many times, we see that that logic is not always correct. Experienced programmers know that different programming languages have different capabilities and different uses, and that you wont always use the same language in a job. While you might be able to do the same job with a certain programming language as with another, that doesn’t mean that there are better ways to do it. Ways to save time and money by making code more efficien...
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