Ir al contenido principal

The roots of al evil

This article is about the idea of  Lisp, its origins and why it was created. We need to take into consideration that technology has changed a lot since the 1950s and every year  Moore's Law becomes more real. We come from an era where big rooms were used for a single computer up to the time where a cellphone has the same power as a computer. In this case that was the problem that McCarthy found out while developing  Lisp. 

 According to the reading, there are many things he needed to take into consideration while developing this language and also because he had to fight a  major programming language: C. This programming language became popular among programmers and people who use a computer but it is still difficult to use for some other things. In this case, what I am referring to is that using C as multiparadigm language and some of the characteristics that make Lisp easier to use and many people who do not program can use.

In the case of the article, the objective is to make the reader understand the way McCarthy thought the programming language and how it was the first thought for computers and the main idea of how to program with this in the old times.  And now we can see how we use Clojure nowadays so we can see all see how it has been evolving through the years. Personally, I consider interesting the way they explain how it used to be so we can see the way we use some of the old instructions have been modified so little we still use them. Also, I consider that we should have read this article at the beginning of the semester due to the fact that we could have seen the origin of this language and get a general idea of how it behaves according to the creator so that we fully understand as we can see a bigger picture of it.

Comentarios

Entradas populares de este blog

Power! Unlimited power!

Throughout history,  humans have seen how life has changed,  how their expectations of technology have evolved and how wrong we were about it since the beginning. In this case, I am referring to the fact that we have a big imagination about what we are capable of, but sometimes, this idea might go too far or ever to close,  there is no middle.  In the specific case of technology,  we have something certain,  some authors like Asimov were right about the limits we should include  in this area, called "The three laws of Robotics": A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.   where we define a limit in the way we use technology.  In the case of comp...

chay' let spanish jatlh

I have always been into languages, and that's maybe I'm studying this career. As I've been learning to program, I've noticed that there are many elements similar between each other, but also, specific differences that make an advantage. The text reminded me of a song called "Qué dificil es hablar el español", where two guys show the differences and similarities between some Spanish speakers countries.  I think that this is almost the same problem that programming languages live, where people who use them try to set them as the most popular or important against others. Personally speaking I think that all languages have their beauty and their characteristics, such as  Spanish, where some words make a phrase sound spectacular. Also, it is important to mention that each language might be easier to teach rather than others, so the programming community might grow up because of this. I know that programming languages have really grown up, but some of them are...