Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

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...
Leer más

The Semicolon Wars

The article written by Brian Hayes, The Semicolon Wars, gives us a look into the deep yet short history that programming languages have had as a whole. The simple fact that by the time the article was written, it could be argued that there were between 2500 programming languages up to the astounding number of 8500 languages, shows us how quickly we as programmers are never satisfied with whatever language we are using, and even if we are, we can always find something that bothers us or that there is something we can do to make a language more powerful or better in our own terms. In the article, it explains how simple things like the use of a semicolon, be it to separate or to end a statement, to the way comments are formatted, can cause friction between the different users of a language. But not only are aesthetic matters the thing that differentiate between two languages but also their function at the time to implement them, Fortran for its computing power, COBOL for its business a...
Leer más