Triumph of the Nerds Part III: Great Artists Steal

"Triumph of the Nerds Part III: Great Artists Steal" is a documental created in 1996 which premise is exactly the creation of the GUI and how this change the world of the computation forever. Now, the documental is mainly about the creation of the concept of GUI which originally was first created for Xerox and later was a concept that Apple took (by inspiration of Xerox) in order to implement a GUI in their inventions, being the Apple Macintosh the best invention that used the GUI created by Apple in that time, telling us that Apple had as "killer software" in that time, a software created by Adobe which gave to the company fame of create hardware dedicated for the computer artists, but that unfortunately wasn't enough to ensure the domain of the competition of Apple in the 90's because all of this was affected by the creation of Windows, the most popular GUI in the history of the computation, which was created for being used in the IBM computers, the most popular computers in the 90's, which turned Microsoft in the powerful company that nowadays is and the strongest competitor for Apple till the date.

Now, the GUI was really the difference that change the world of the computers for good and made that the computers were the great success that are nowadays, because nowadays all the computer systems from PCs to tablets use GUI's for everything doing possible that the use of the applications be more friendly and intuitive to use for anyone.

With this documental we can see that it doesn't matter if you are the first one to have a potential idea just like XEROX did, because if you don't take advantage of it, you will lose against other rivals that see your idea or also have the idea and do take advantage of it just like Apple or Microsoft.

If you are interested in watching this vides: here's the link: Triumph of the Nerds Part III: Great Artists Steal.

Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

The article "Language as the 'Ultimate Weapon' in Nineteen Eighty-Four" written by Jem Berkes tell us that in this novel a very important weapon that the government use to control the society is the language because this important tool that the people use to express their ideas is the one that allows us as humans think and express freely about all the things and situations that take place in our lives, the ones that can be positive for us and for the other people and also the negatives, the latter being very destructive for the government in the "1984" novel because the government here have to be praised and never judged.

Jem Berkes (2000) says in his article that the language is something that allows us as humans communicate our ideas in different ways, characteristic that is very beneficent for us because this help us to think in a more free and creative way, this being supported by Myers (1986) who said that "expanding our language is expanding the ability to think" and that "different languages impose different conceptions of reality", ideas that are clearly logic because between more words and ways to express we have, more ways of thinking and reason the situations we can use in order to attach the idea in a clearly and existent way that other people can understand easily. 

Like O’Brien say "People can't commit crimes if there's not a world or concept who describe it". We need words in order to imagine and create new things.

Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?

The novel is the perfect counterexample of our reality speaking of programming languages. Imagine you want to solve a problem which use an object oriented approach and there's only ONE programming language to use, not a very rich one, and it is also a functional language. Then you are in problems, that's why the variety in languages is important so you can express anything you want in the best way possible.

If you're interested in reading this article: here's the link: Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If you're interested in reading George Orwell's: 1984's novel, here's the link: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Rich Hickey on Clojure

Rich Hickey is the creator of the Clojure programming language and in the podcast "Rich Hickey on Clojure" produced by Software Engineering Radio in the year 2010, he precisely talks about what is the main differences between his programming language and the rest of the languages that are based on Lisp, telling to the audience the benefits that Clojure has and also how Clojure can be a good tool in the world of programming thanks to its particular characteristics. 

Clojure is a dynamic program language for the VJM that between his attributes has inmutability and pure functions with a functional focus and concurrency which makes of Clojure a good option for the parallel programming, also this programming language has data literals as lists, maps and vectors contrasting with the single use of the nested lists in Lisp, which is a great characteristic that in the world of the Lisp makes Clojure a alternative with many options to choose. 

Also, Clojure as a Lisp language programming have the characteristic of  "programming in metaprogramming" which makes Clojure a different language type to use in situations like for example as scientists or researcher which makes Clojure a good element for the singular use and not for mainstream activities. In the case of Clojure, the target public can be the ordinary programmers that works with Java or C++ because in the core Clojure is more simpler and powerful that Java. This can be false because in my opinion Java is more easy to use because it have more tools which as a programmer can use in a more easy way because Java is more easy to learn if you are used to program declarative languages but maybe everything is a situation of get better with practice and Clojure can be a good example of this if as a programmers we can learn to use this language.

Another characteristic of Clojure is that it permits the use of libraries that can do the work more easy with the different data structures that Clojure allow to use which is a great because with these libraries the use of lists and collections is more easy to implement and also a very important characteristic of Clojure is that with in this tool the values don't change because the data structures are immutable and this makes that the data structure has a great performance warranty because this characteristic makes possible that the values don't have to be locked and with this the language can be used in situations where the concurrence and parallelism programation is important. 

All the previous information is a small sample of the power that Clojure can offer to the programmers that search a new way of programming and more if this new way includes concurrent programming that make use of the data structures as lists which handling is more easy to do with a Lisp programming language.