Revenge of the Nerds

The article starts by saying somewhat of a story about a boss that really does not know about technology and programming languages. So in this story the boss gives you a task or problema to solve but he asked you to do it in Java, why Java? Well, the author says, it is because that is the standard of programming languague in that time, and the boss thinks that all this programming languages are equivalent. This is a common mistake the author addresses as confortable idea, because not only does people who do not know about this stuff think this way, also some programmers have this way of thinking.

He then says that programs like Java that tried to be better that C++, and Perl, and Python and so on, they are tending to be more like Lisp, a language created in 1958 by John McCarty. And this language is so powerful and differentiate of other, is that it was not meant to be a programming language, instead it was conceived like a theory, like the article says “an effort to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing Machine”. Then one of his students said something like, “hey, why not make a programming language out of this?” and then McCarthy was like “what? Haha no. This is not meant to be a programming language” so the student was like “hold my assembler code”, and he made the programming language named Lisp (not actual conversation, but I think is somewhat what really happen). Something I was not aware and when I read it in the article, was that recursion, something that is learned in almos every language, was something born in Lisp, this information blew my mind (not literally) because I asked myself, if this recursion was born in Lisp, why is not teach this when they teach you how recursion works in other languages.