Triumph of the Nerds 2

It is very interesting to see the growth of an industry where Apple and IBM were the main contributors in the development and popularization of this splendid invention. It is well know that many companies started to work together but in a very competitive world and with highly demanding customers the companies must innovate or in some point break relationships with other companies to offer the latest technological developments to survive.

It's amazing to see how IBM collapsed thanks to its separation with Microsoft caused for the issues related to which operative system IBM computers should use. IBM didn’t want to incorporate the new operative system Microsoft was developing, instead they wanted to integrate its own version, also developed my Microsoft, the OS/2. This controversy caused the disruption of this two companies. While IBM started its way to collapse Microsoft began its way to success.

Therefore we can understand in a better way how Microsoft became one of the giant in the IT industry nowadays. The company realized that more than a powerful hardware the customer needed an easier way to use an operative system and programs for the average people that don’t know about how computers work.

It is very important for us to not forget that everything big came from a small idea, an opportunity and to learn to seize that opportunity like Bill Gates did by partnering with IBM, thanks to that moment it became what it is today and if we can learn anything from it is to seize every opportunity.

Language as the Ultimate Weapon

1984 is a great book, I love how Orwell imagined the manipulation of human beings philosophically, not by force or violence, it’s just masterful, Orwell shows us how something as simple as language, which is a tool for human communication and a crucial part of our everyday lives can be used as a powerful weapon against the human race. Just imagine the difficulty of speaking your mind with someone that does not know your language, we would have incomplete ideas and we would be broken and this would stop any act of rebellion against the government which is what we read in this book.

If we think of the novel as programming, then we see that as programmers, we suffer directly what is known only one programming language and not being able to do many things, due the limitations of that language. However, we learn a new language each semester, so we expand our options and ability to solve problems and this gives you perspective into why it is important to be open to new languages and tools.

Any student taking this course is going to love the book of 1984 and get a little more perspective in the importance of language and start being more open into learning more stuff.

The promises of Functional Programming

This article talks about mainly the advantages of LISP and functional programming, which is the capability to produce more code using macros, in this article it is said that functional programming permits writing programs using functions this gives you a different way of thinking on how imperative languages works.

Functional programming is far more compact and easily adapted into parallel work and its principle is that computation is achieved by composing functions as in the mathematical sense and that always generates the same output as given the same input in contrast to imperative programming. There is also the fact that in functional programming variables are not used or loops which are replaced by recursion, and overall writing code it’s sometimes far more fast allowing us to write parallel programs without the use if locks with makes everything more efficient in contrast to imperative languages.

Functional programming overall represents an easier approach at creating concurrent programs because of the behaviors it uses and the ones it doesn’t. Also this article speaks about the strengths and limitations of functional programming the most important one is our dependence into imperative languages and our way of thinking that initially makes the use and understanding functional languages complicated.