ProgrammingLanguages1021294

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...

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 ...