Beating the averages

Beating the Averages

Beating the Averages is an article –written by Paul Graham– which explains how the the first web app was created.

The writer explains that one of the essential part was the language that they would use. Thew were extremely proficient using Lisp. Even though everyone was using C or some other low-level language, they decided to stick with Lisp cause they knew the language all the way around and this would help releasing new features really fast. When you use the language you’re most comfortable with or when you are writing new code, it takes a lot of time to lookup some information like “How to do ___ in language ____”. This type of searches become more and more often the more you are unfamiliar with the language. When you need speed, this is not the best way to go.

When you are beginning a startup, what language to use is one of the hardest things to do. You  know that using some languages or technologies will make the development easier to make for certain functions. However, any language can be used, and it may be required to do some extra research. That extra research time is the one you need to minimize.

The writer has a theory about the language we are more comfortable with, he calls it The Blub paradox. He calls Blub the language a person is more familiar with. So when you’re programming and doing some stuff in other language, programmer will often turn back to see Blub and notice that it lacks features. One last advice from author was to learn Lisp as a language, not because you’re actually gonna use it. You may not even use it but it makes your reasoning and coding skills improve.

All this advices are really nice to have. Most of the time, when you think of starting your own project, you’re not sure on what language to choose or start on and you should just stick to the one you’re more comfortable with.

The Semicolon Wars

The Semicolon Wars is an excellent article –written by Brian Hayes– which explains how the languages have evolved to make it better to communicate our thoughts to the computer.

It has excellent analogies and also quite interesting facts. I did not know there were 6,912 different languages and dialects that humans use, neither that there were even more programming languages than that. What makes it even more surprising is that all these have been developed only over ~50 years!

I also liked how at the end, Hayes explains how there's always a language that we hold onto. In my case it is Java. I thought that this was because this was the first programming language I learnt but I notice that wasn't true (I had learnt Python before). I think it was because of all the programming I did in competitive programming using Java. Even though, I have never used Java in production or real projects so I am not really aware of how Java performs in those situations.

One thing that really caught my attention was that all these programming languages are develop for different features and situations and that is why there are so many different of them, because people find it easier to program in some rather than others. But what if there was no barriers to communicate what you want to program; if you could just think about it and the computer would start developing it. It would reduce the need of learning multiple programming languages and we could take more time analyzing the project and what we need to code, instead of trial and error.  I really liked this idea, however, we would first need a "brain to machine-language translator" and we would also need one that worked the other way around for code maintenance. It still needs years of AI and machine learning, but I hope we are not that far from that.

Hi! My name is...!

When I first noticed I was going to take the Programming Languages course I was really confused. From the beginning of my major I've had many programming courses with different languages. This is the reason why the name confused me a bit. I didn't know if we were going to overview many programming languages or if it would be more towards how a language was made or what exactly should I expect. After the first class, I realized we were mostly going to work with Clojure but that is about it.

As hobbies I like to watch movies and TV series. I also like to play some video games, however I don't consider myself a hardcore gamer. I am also into competitive programming and solving problems.

I enjoy almost all types of music, but what I'll be listening to depends mainly on my mood and what else I'm doing while listening to music. I like many different TV programs like Breaking Bad, sense8, skins, How I Met Your Mother, Malcolm in the Middle and many others. I am not really into reading books but when I saw we would read 1984 by Orwell I was quite excited since I've been wanting to read that book for a while now.

I'm pretty sure I'll have a fun time learning new things in this class and I'm keen for it!