Language as the Ultimate Weapon

Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?

Nineteen Eighty-Four is definitely one of my favorite books, I think that George Orwell imagined perfectly how human beings can be manipulated in a rather sophisticated way, what I mean is that not only through violence or torture can be broken a person.

The language is considered a tool of human communication, thus it is able to convey and express thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc. If the government decides to mold the people's thoughts, obviously he should start by language. The purpose of Newspeak was create a tool to limit freedom of thought, so that people could shorten most of his thoughts. The result of a poor vocabulary is that people would not have the ability to imagine acts of rebellion or fighting against the government.

George Orwell shows that language can be a powerful weapon against human consciousness. Just think how difficult is communication when we do not know another language, our ideas are not fully expressed and we feel that something is missing.

If we translate the novel to a programming environment, then we see that as programmers, we suffer directly what is know only one programming language and not being able to do many things, due the limitations of that language. However, we learn a new language each semester, so we expand our options and ability to solve problems.

It is important to know different languages to appreciate the differences and characteristics of each. Programming languages are used to communicate with the computer, which gives us great power to develop applications that will be used by many people.

Finally I can say that a student taking the course of programming languages must read Nineteen Eighty-Four to understand the great power of language in our lives. We began to think in different paradigms and although at first it is difficult, we got used to switch between different languages without limitations and we have more options when deciding what is best for coding an application.

References

Berkes, J. (2000). Language as the Ultimate Weapon. Retrieved March 22nd, 2016 from http://www.berkes.ca/archives/berkes_1984_language.html

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Triumph of the Nerds Part III

Great artist steal

In this last part of the documentary it is possible to see the evolution of Apple and Microsoft and its battle to revolutionize the software and hardware industry.

Within this competition, we have IBM with the release of PC in the early 80s. In second place, Microsoft was positioned in the global market thanks to its DOS operating system, which was the main system for personal computers compatible with IBM PC. Finally, Apple gained popularity for its Apple II computer.

Xerox (the world's largest provider of photocopiers) made a big mistake by inviting Steve Jobs to the research center at Palo Alto, California. Probably the story would be different had it not been the case. Xerox was the first to introduce the concept of GUI and Steve Jobs stole and improved the idea. I do not want to detract from Steve Jobs work, since he was a great visionary that knew how to seize the opportunity and exploit it to the maximum to succeed. Thanks to his high quality standards we can see how the products of the company he founded are truly amazing, the aesthetic features make the difference with other products.

Good artist copy. Great artist steal

Regarding this phrase, I believe that the great inventions are created through the influence of the ideas we receive from our environment. The fact of copying an idea does not "benefit" anyone, since it is not adding anything of value. When an artist copy we found a lack of creativity, but when he rob, then he transform the idea into something new, something that belongs to him. I think that this is the same with the productos that are launched every year, between the same companies the features are copied and only add small differences, however, are not vital differences.

Obviously I disagree with the kind of practices that companies often come to have for the simple fact of wanting to position themselves above the competition. In this video we can see the thin line between copying and theft products, Xerox unfortunately lost the legal battle that he fought against Apple. Apple did the same with Microsoft, as saying that each new feature that he added was similar to the Mac, also the way it looked and felt the graphical interface was a copy.

Finally, the most interesting of the video is the tenacity that had both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I think a good entrepreneur is always looking for ways to innovate and not be left behind in what refers to technological advances. The good entrepeneur does not expect the launch of something new to try to reach the competition.

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Rich Hickey on Clojure

In this new blog entry I will talk about the episode of Software Engineering Radio, which was a conversation with Rich Hickey, creator of the dialect of Lisp programming language called Clojure. In recent weeks I have been talking about the many advantages of programming in Clojure, but I had never heard the point of view of the creator.

The truth is that I really liked program in Clojure, as it makes the code much simpler. At first it cost me a lot of work the paradigm shift, because in other languages the result is many lines of code.

I must admit that before this course of Programming Languages, I had not heard anything about Lisp or Clojure. As the author says, certainly Lisp is not a mainstream language, since it was created for research purposes and only super-users or very smart people used it.

However, when the radio announcer asked to Rich what is the target audience of Clojure, Hickey simply answered: open-minded programmers. I can say that I totally agree with this statement, because you have to leave a little aside what we know about other languages. Usually we try to write programs in Clojure in the same way we would in C, but Clojure is part of a totally different paradigm.

Apart from the simplicity, Clojure has the advantage that its data structures are immutable, so it is a very good choice for concurrency.

Despite Clojure is no a very popular language, we know that startups have begun to occupy it because it gives them a competitive advantage (for more information see Beating the Averages), which I think is good because in this way goes up in the ranking of popularity and more and more people will discover (as I am doing <3) all things that can be done with Clojure.

Finally, I think it is good to know Clojure because we learn to appreciate some of its features that make our life easier.

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