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Mostrando las entradas de agosto, 2018

Beating the Averages

For a long time in school I have had the experience of "having to" learn a programming language, and mostly the reason is that "we will be working on a project that requires the use of that language" and, in my opinion that's fair; but sometimes it is because we have to understand the whole picture (like c in operating systems). In practice the definition of a "strange syntax" has more to do with the fact that it's mostly a syntax that has uncommon elements like lisp, and given that in our course  we are using clojure, a language "based" on lisp's paradigm, we get as a result a very uncommon experience as computer science students. It also says that usually programmers are "married" with the programming languages that are their favorites, but when you know more than two or three programming languages you begin to get the idea where a language is more effective than the other for certain tasks. For example: recently I sta

The semicolon wars

As a regular programmer, I sometimes get confused when at the time I’m using different languages for different projects, but ironically that’s how I get to know them better, in fact, that little confusion becomes less notorious. In this article the analogy of regular languages and programming languages are much more than a simple comparison and I think that it has something to do with my little experience using different programming languages for different projects. If we extrapolate that experience to another where someone can speak in many languages, we might get to notice that there are some kind of “reciprocation” between them and that might not be a simple coincidence. For many centuries, the language has been an extremely important part of the human development, since historically speaking it has immortally impressed in it little fragments of the meaning of that history; but that doesn’t end there, the language has been and stills being one of the most important tools to get

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

A.I. has been the pinnacle of computer science ever since the Turing’s machine, and the first premise to supporting that is “with a machine with infinite resources is possible to transcend Turing’s computability” (V. Müller, 2014). According to Dick Gabriel in the podcast Lisp was a programming language that was developed around 60’s and it was mainly oriented to the study and development of artificial intelligence. For the time, the structure of lisp was more common for those that studied Turing’s machine given by the fact that its structure was strongly related since its main data structure was the List which remind me to the tape used for Alan’s machine. The basic use case for the List as a data structure was to use a defined language or dialect that they were meant to process via a macro. Gabriel also said that the Lisp paradigm was “made” the way it was with the unclear intention of making A.I. developers the only ones that can make A.I. research, but that is something that s