My programming languages course, by Diego Canizales

Hello and welcome to another post in my blog about functional programming. In this space we review several advances and insights made possible by the functional programming paradigm as a relatively new way to solve computational problems. In this occasion,  I read " The promises of functional programming ", by a scientific computer researcher named Konrad Hinsen. In this paper, we can learn some core differences between the object-oriented style programming and the functional style-oriented programming. In general, we have spoken before about this differences throughly, which include: There are almost no  variables  It's power relies on  pure functions . No for loops, everything is implemented through recursion. Parallelization and concurrency  optimizations. This main reasons are several that show that functional programming is essential, in my opinion, as a compliment to object - oriented languages, like Java. Let me explain each point, befor...

Last Friday during my programming language course we watched a film named Triumph of the Nerds. The film is about how a bunch of nerds changed the way we live, the way we work, even the way we think. The documentary is about personalities like Steve Wozniak, who was the mastermind behind the first operative system. Other personalities like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer come into the equation, drawing a neat picture of how the world of computers was built. It was amazing to see the main characters of the computer era in this documentary, but I think they forgot about someone who absolutely changed todays live: Linus Trovalds. Linus Trovalds is the person behind Linux. For giving you a perspective on how important is the development and the community around Linux, check this out: 1.- Linux is the first operating system that is completely open source, this means that every single breakthrough or improvement someone makes on it, it has to be posted online. And as you might h...

So Clojure is a new programming language developed by a person named Rich Hickey. You can hear about the features of this programming language  here . The developer of Clojure then states what we feared the most, we were right. Lisp language wasn't firstly thought to be used by everyone. In one of my previous posts you can hear another podcast by Dick Gabriel on why did Lisp languages fail so bad. You can go ahead and read my review on that podcast too, to which you can find a link in the post too. Basically it explains that lisp failed because of many many things, but mainly because of what he calls " the winter of lisp" and how did artificial intelligence made lisp languages fail so bad. Now there is a new hope, another lisp like language has been developed, and it still in it's early days, but it already addresses many of the problems that lisp had, and added some cool new features. Some of the solutions that Clojure provides are: Interoperability with th...

So, once again we go to Paul Graham and his absolute amazing opinions on lisp. He understands the difficulty in changing the industry, but faces this with a good sense of humor and courage. You can check out his blog entry here . Taking it to the next level So the story goes like this. Michael Phelps went out there to change the world of an olympic sport. And did. Only he and his coaches know what he is doing differently but definitely, he is. Michael Phelps is such a good example because before Phelps, it was very rare to think of a swimmer that could do all the strokes in a competition, from crawl from breast stroke to his olympic record breaking butterfly stroke. In a sense, Phelps is like lisp. Phelps came to the 2004 Athens olympic games as a kid, he was only 19 years old, but everyone knew he had the chance to break the olympic record for 7 gold medals in the same event. He went on it and won 8 of them. So... what is he doing differently than any other swimmer? How long does...