My programming languages course, by Diego Canizales

During this blog entry, I was asked to reflect on one question: Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course? In case I haven't told you before, in my programming languages course we were reading 1984 by George Orwell. The book is about a man that is trapped in a totalitarian system. He is just, let's say, another gear in a super huge mechanism. This man, Winston Smith was a little bit different from everybody else. He saw what others didn't want to see about their way of living. He saw the little mistakes that the system made and how they deprived them of their humanity. It seemed like everybody else just wouldn't notice that they were being lied to. In the book, the party had three slogans that were supposed to guide the way people living: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. Let's take a look at the first slogan first: War is Peace. By making the people beli...

The Roots of LISP, by Paul Graham. This is  one of the hardest readings that we had to do in the course. During our programming languages course we have been working with Clojure, a new dialect of LISP that makes everything a little bit more readable. Trying to extrapolate everything we know in Clojure to LISP is not hard, but it's not trivial either. So if you want to go ahead and read The Roots of Lisp, by Paul Graham , you better have a solid foundation of Clojure or any LISP dialect that you are familiar with. So after giving you this brief introduction let's get right into a review to this reading. Paul Graham made a review of what John McCarthy found when he discovered this new dialect for making mathematical notation more readable. Let's get into the main points of the reading, so that you can go ahead and read it again by yourself. 1.- Using lists for both data and code. One of the things that's probably the most weird to understand is this little sen...