The Semicolon Wars



The “semicolon wars” is an article written by Brian Hayes, he starts saying that ‘If you want to be a thoroughgoing world traveler, you need to learn 6,912 ways to say “Where is the toilet, please?”’, and what he meant by that, is that if you want to be a polyglot programmer, you need to learn more tan 8,500 different programming languages. That is a great number, mostly because I did not know that were that many.

Also he states that we are far from founding a “perfect” language, with the best notation for expressing an algorithm or defining a data structure. ‘Cause many would say that he is not right, that we already have a fine language, but everyone will say a different one like C#, Java, Python, etc.

Well, I can understand the “wars” that he exposes in the article, since this semester I would be using 4 different programming languages, I am getting confused already with some, for example, I was happy programming in C, when I tried to run my program, it marked me an error and I was like “what? How? Why?” until I discovered it was because I didn’t put semicolons and I can blame Clojure for that. I’m not saying that I hate Clojure, but it is going to be difficult for me to divide my mind in four to give each language its respective place so I can programm with more efficiency.

To give a conclusion, I really enjoyed this article, the way he wrote it was so good that I showed it to my friends and they also really liked it. I learned some other new things like the insane quantity of programming languages and how to read a date in Java, and I will be looking forward to learn new programming languages (when I get this 4 right of course).

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

Introduction: About Me

So yeah.. my name is Ricardo Adolfo Esquivel Licona and I'm 24 years old, my birthday is in December 24, so feel free to give me presents. My hobbies are playing lots of videogames so I can call myself a gamer, I also like to watch some anime, and for the TV series I only watched Sherlock, and maybe I could give a try to Mr. Robot but that is for the ethereal future. And for the books, I am not and avid reader, so I can't say too much about this, but some books I have read are The Little Prince and What Falls From Your Eyes, this ones are the ones that I can recollect in my memory right now... oh yeah also the book called The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, I'm open to give a try more books, but also that's for the ethereal future c: . I could say that I am visual person, so I aim more for movies, I like to watch almost any movie... except horror... and one that I can recommend watching right now is Your Name, even though is an anime movie and you don't like anime,...
Leer más

Beating the Average

This article is very interesting because it explains on why the author says that Lisp is a very powerful language. He starts telling a story of a company to say the least that was developed in with Lisp and in that time it was a very good advantage because every other app was developed in C and was running in the desktop, what made this program in Lisp so unique was that was build in their own servers, which means that they could use whatever language they wanted (Lisp), and that they could write and developed thing in a more efficient time, so when their competitors built a feature to stand out, they could replicated ore ven make it better. After that story he tells us the secret of why using Lisp was their secret weapon. In first place he stated that using a language that almost anybody uses or even understands is a key point. Also that Lisp use something called macros, as he explains, macros are programs that make programs, so, What that means is that the code of a program ...
Leer más