Max Castillo Programming Languages

This week we paid another visit to Paul Graham. In his article “Revenge of the Nerds”, he talks about how bad is the knowledge and culture about the diversity of programming languages on the administrative levels of big corporations and how this is detrimental to the development of new software. Paul starts by defining a fictional character called “Pointy Haired Boss”, which he takes from the Dilbert comic strips.   This character is your everyday boss who knows his ways around administrative stuff but knows little to nothing about the inner workings of the projects he manages. This character becomes particularly problematic because usually he has control over what language is going to be used for a particular application. A few weeks ago I wrote about how, in my experience, some programming languages are better suited for certain applications. Even Lisp with its all-powerfulness may not be as well fitted for a dedicated embedded system that just does one thing.   That’s why

For this week’s entry we listened to what Dick Gabriel had to say about Lisp. Dick Gabriel is a prominent programmer known for his work on common Lisp. I particularly liked this week’s assignment because Gabriel seems like a real ‘Master Yoda’ when it comes to Lisp. First, the interviewer and Gabriel give us the usual briefing about Lisp, how it was one of the earliest programming languages, how it’s largely based on nesting functions and its heavy use on AI applications. Then they speak of how Lisp was born, how they wanted to have something with a certain degree of intelligence, and I found interesting the analogy he does with the language being a lot like a city, with programs never ceasing to run. I found interesting the fact that according to Gabriel, Lisp was created overnight as an attempt of having a program that could compute anything, and how its eval function had to be hand-compiled. Also thanks to Gabriel it became clear to me how it is that Lisp works with lists