Programming Languages 201913

"Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four" is an essay written by Jem Berkes in 2000. In the article, Jem Berkes discusses the inspiration behind the Newspeak language used by George Orwell inside his novel 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) and how it reflects in real-world situations we face day to day and how the language is powerful enough to express meaning, intention and ability.  Inside the novel 1984, there is a language called Newspeak which is a simplification of the English language, or as the novel refers it as Oldspeak. Newspeak vocabulary eliminates words that are not necessary. The new vocabulary helped the government to control people and affect memories from person's, in order to forget most of them or provoke and affect the way a person could express or think. However, in this particular entry I won't talk about the essay written by Jem Berkes, I will answer a question asked by my professor which is something related to the essay...

"The Secret History of Women in Coding” is an article written by Clive Thompson and published in The New York Times Magazine in February, 2019. In the article, the writer talks about women that have contributed to the advancement of Computer Science. In this article, the story of Mary Allen Wilkes is told. When she was young, she had no idea that she wanted to be a programmer as she preferred to be an attorney. However her teachers told her to give it a try, so she went to MIT where she was hired in a programmer job. This event has shown me how welcoming a company is to anyone who is looking for a place in it. Mary Allen Wilkes operated in a completely different environment from ours, where they had to write the programs on paper and then transcribe the instructions into holes on a card. In addition to the complexity of the programs, managing limited memory was another challenge. Every command on every line of code had to be totally relevant. Even though she was not...

"The Roots of Lisp” is an article written by Paul Graham in 2002. In the article, the writer talks about how John McCarthy worked with simple operations and notations, which later would become Lisp. Just as a reminder, Lisp is a programming language and it stands for  "List Processing". According to Paul Graham, there have been only two consistent models of programming: the C model and the Lisp model. He also tells that new programming languages in the past twenty years would be taking the C model of computing and add functions taken from the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection. The evolution in computer's performance and hardware has made that the new programming languages move to the Lisp model. In the article, Paul Graham explains the bases in which Lisp was created using the rules of John McCarthy. The writer mentions that Lisp can be written in itself. First, we have the seven primitive operators: quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons y cond. T...