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Revenge of the nerds

  This article is quite old but still talks about relevant topics, maybe we are condemned to repeat history over and over again at least when talking about programming, it begins with a little introduction about popularity of languages and why the would be selected by management because of incomplete information or for thinking that all languages are the same so you can choose the most popular so all your possible employees are interchangeable. It makes an argument to not take the most new and shiny because it may lack features of the more established and matures languages, today in my own opinion it does happen because of that anymore in fact I would say that most business try to stay with the current model they have even if it is 50 years old, maybe it was written in the aftermath of the release of Java where things changed quite a bit because it was a way friendlier language compared to the old ones that came with lots of tools so you could focus in the actual problem to solve and n
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Are we there yet

  This talks about something that I have been wondering and I think I had even mentioned it in some other blog post, about how the world is nowadays hard dominated by the Object Oriented languages and how they do not have blatant differences, sure the have a lot of dissimilar things but nothing too important, a different implementation of this a different implementation of that end of line, parenthesis, brackets space agnostic, etc. It basically all comes down to little personalization for some niche of people with the way they like to do things, the people take it and in most cases never drop it, getting accustomed to it, and there is never a change to the core structure of how things are imagined and how you pose it. He explains that the objects shouldn't be the building block over which we program, function should the ones that take that place, because objects are flawed as the description of the real world, they are easy to understand and it is a way in which we see the world t
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A New Age of JVM Garbage Collectors

  The great problem with memory as with a lot of things in life and life itself is that it is a finite resource there comes a time when it can run out, that’s where garbage collector come in, a lot of nowadays applications for the processors need from memory to store mid calculations there comes a time where if not erased those mid calculations will fill the memory and break the process, so a garbage collector is tasked with dealing with those pesky bits of data that aren’t needed anymore. The simplest way to manage memory is basically doing it manually, saying of curse that you are doing the work to simplify the work of the computer, and its amazing if you do it well but it relies on you doing it well and doing the work and could also lead to problems with fragmentation reducing it awesomeness. Automatic reference counting is another method pretty efficient but with a great flaw, that has memory leaks, so it is usually not used by its own and has the problem of fragmentation too. Mark
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Rich Hickey on Clojure

  The main characteristics of Clojure are pretty interesting, it is a lisp, it is designed to be hosted that solving one of the principal problems that lisp had, because it was not as easy target for all audiences, because of that Clojure runs in the JVM, it is a functional language so we have the cores of functional programming pure functions and immutability of data structures and it has a focus in concurrency. In a Lisp the data structures that you use in an everyday basis are the ones used by the actual language to function, so they are very well tested supported and usually you do not need to reinvent the wheel to work with your own data and an important point of that is that there is not a big leap from normal programming to meta programming since the two of them use the same data structure and functions to process them. Being openly in the JVM mean it can access all the java functions an interact with java programs solving one of the problems more prevalent in Lisp that was made
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Roots of Lisp

  This article makes the effort to explain the advance to science that was Lisp in the age that John McCarty wrote it and the main concepts about it, its simplicity but also the smartness of it, considering that in this day and age most programming languages that were based in the formula of c are taking lots of inspiration from Lisps and implementing its functions into their own core it is really worth it to know how the Lisps are made from the inside out. It comments that everything is either an atom or a list of expressions and an expression yields a return value, it salso talks about the quote that is a way for telling that we do not want  the next list to be evaluated as an expression, because by default every list is an expression the first parameter is going to be considered as a function applied the the next parameters, and if the first parameter is a number or a symbol it will not know what to do with it. And the most important thing is how we can write functions that can act
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Dick Gabriel on Lisp

  The first thing that impressed me about is the age of Lisp, even today functional programming is considered black magic by a lot of people, is quite a different paradigm to what we are accustomed to and it being so old but still being a novelty is quite amusing, second thing is that he talked about making functions in runtime, that in a lot of situations would be awesome for some applications since clojure comes from lisp a expect it to have it too maybe even a better more refined version of it, I see how combining the compactness of the language and its ability to kinda write itself could be an enormous advantage thinking about programmer time and if you can do the same with less lines of code it will probably be cheaper to produce, maybe I’m wrong because at the end of the day you still have to think the logic of the program and it eats some of those savings. Thinking about artificial intelligence and science guys as its core audience is quite advanced to this era, I think Lisp eas
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The Secret History of Women in Coding

  Those histories are quite interesting and actually funny in a way in those times of the first general purpose computers no one had actual qualifications, a career or higher studies about computers programming so they were hiring basically anyone with any kind of experience that would relate to the topic or that the interview would consider relates, because of that a lot of women were hired to be programmers since they had some experience with military systems from WWII. It is quite funny that an oppression in WWII for given women “jobs for women” is what gave them the power to stand for themselves in the workforce of that era in a field that is still considered the future of the world 70 year after. Wilkes said that working in computer science was a lonely task, I guess since they had to test a lot of untested things by themselves and they do not shared a lot of times with the team,  but she also said that everyone in her team accepted hear and that they were a bunch of geeks so I do
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