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