Clojure

We've seen that Paul Graham is a massive fanboy of Lisp. He mentions that:

"As one data point on the curve, at any rate, if you were to compete with ITA and chose to write your software in C, they would be able to develop software twenty times faster than you. If you spent a year on a new feature, they'd be able to duplicate it in less than three weeks. Whereas if they spent just three months developing something new, it would be five years before you had it too."

(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

[](int n, int i){return n + i}

public interface Inttoint { public int call(int i); } public static Inttoint foo(final int n) { return new Inttoint() { int s = n; public int call(int i) { s = s + i; return s; }}; }

Today we are going to discuss the main topic of Dick Gabriel's podcast on Software Engineering Radio.

In this podcast he discusses the creation on Lisp in Stanford.

The topic I want to talk about is: Why functional programming is making a comeback into the software engineering field, and why it didn't do it before.

Having automatic garbage collection and a meta programming via lists on top of a compiler creates a big problem that only processing power solves: Overhead.

When Dick Gabriel invented Lisp, it was considered real slow to implement a program in Lisp. The amount of overhead per instruction is monumental to programs for architectures that handle RAM below 128 MB. Once we had the massive capacity of today's computing power, we can implement Garbage collection in whim, like in Erlang without over-extending our capacity of software.

It is also quite interesting to me that Lisp died down. For me one of the most important things that came out of Lisp is that everyone hates the parenthesis way of coding, Plenty of people have mentioned that they prefer Erlang to Lisp. A Parenthesis based structure also causes overhead to the programmer as he has to make sure that every parenthesis they make matches to another parenthesis.

Nowadays, it seems that the only implementations Lisp has is in very specialized web-apps that require meta-programming to be coded. It is quite interesting that you can code lisp in lisp, as Dick mentioned, but I wouldn't consider it an advantage over other programming languages.

One last thing that was very interesting is the notion that coding can be considered an Art. And the compatibility between writing literature and writing code. They both require a certain discipline to be executed correctly. With enough repetition and enough practice, you can achieve excellence in both according to Dick Gabriel.

This is the first installment in a series of articles that I'll be reviewing to add some content to my blog. The first article to review is going to be "The Semicolon Wars" by Brian Hayes.

The article was published in the acclaimed magazine "American Scientist".This article starts by creating a metaphor between the languages spoken in the world, and the programming languages in the world. One of my highlights of the article, is the following quote:

"That means that we've been inventing one language a week, on average, ever since Fortran."

I recommend this article if you really want to pique your curiosity start, like me, a deep dive in Wikipedia, searching for languages older than Google. One of my favorite searches was the "Simula 67" language. Which is really amazing to see. It looks like the weird son of Visual Basic with C

Simula 67 code for a Sigma function. [Thanks Wikipedia]

Real Procedure Sigma (k, m, n, u);
   Name k, u;
   Integer k, m, n; Real u;
Begin
   Real s;
   k:= m;
   While k <= n Do Begin s:= s + u; k:= k + 1; End;
   Sigma:= s;
End;

There are conventions as long as there are variants, the author mentions. I do think it is a fun and  insightful thought. Which is why I decided to do my opinionated echelon of the best programming languages (and also making other programmers mad in the process.)

Tabs vs Spaces
tabs, as tabs are resizable to each one's comfortable view. But I should probably switch to spaces, because Programmers that use spaces earn more

Naming Conventions
droopyCamelCase for all methods
CamelCase for all classes
_  for private members.
_  for spaces (javascript go away with your - )

IDE
Sublime text for life. IntelliJ and Webstorm for all other things

One of the interesting things that the article made me reflect about is Hendrik Einchenhardt's quote:

"shared mutable state is the root of all evil."

Programming Languages

- My expectations:

I will be able to code in Clojure, observing the new trends in programming languages, including functional programming in an efficient way.

· Your hobbies and personal interests.

I love playing video games, specifically Rocket League, but I also exercise almost daily, and I try to read at least 30 minutes a day. Lately I am very interested in psychology, so I am reading and studying a lot of this.

  Books, music, movies, TV shows, etc. Which you have recently enjoyed.

Books you've enjoyed a lot lately: Influence by Robert B. Ciadini. Rework, by Jason Fried. Think Like a Freak, by Freakonomics, and Paul Allen's Idea Man. Also, the series that I liked the most is Black Mirror.