Programming Languages

  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

  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

  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

  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