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The Roots of Lisp

The Roots of Lisp is, in my opinion, one of the weirder texts we've read, not because it's content is actually strange, but because it is very unexpected. We have been reading mostly blogs or conference transcripts about lisp where the focus in placed on the actual presentation of content and the isn't much code or anything like that. This article on the other hand reads almost like a manual with most of its content being code or brief explanations of it. That caught my by surprise, being used to other styles of text that we have read before. Anyhow, I found it difficult to read (as in heavy not actually complicated) but more interesting than I had expected, even so I don't really think it was very informative, most of what it said we already knew even if we knew it in a less detailed way and it didn't explain or even mentioned new concepts, It just went in to a lot of detail about how lisp was first created as a concept, using common lisp syntax instead of the actu...
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Rich Hickey on Clojure

To be honest this is the first time I don't really find anything super interesting or at least good enough to make a comment about it. Nonetheless given that I do have to do it irregardless of my opinion here it is. I think this podcast wasn't quite as interesting as the rest of the things we've read or heard is because it is kinda getting old: the "LISP (and by extension Clojure) is so much better than any other language in the world" speech is just the same as in all other assignments we've had. The problem is, in my opinion, that we haven't reached yet the ability in Clojure to at least verify the things that we keep reading about. To this point Clojure just feels like a really uninteresting language that has a really ugly and unwieldy syntax, I would even say that there are a bunch of languages out there that would render the problems we've had to deal with trivial, and Clojure has just made it much more complicated. To me it still doesn't feel...
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The revenge of the nerds

Again we have read a conference transcript that talks about the power of lisp over all other languages, this time using more concrete examples (even if they where using super old versions of all the languages present) which I liked, because it gave me some sense of what they are all talking about (the people that say Lisp is the most powerful language ever). About this article what I found to be the most interesting is that in one of the examples he gave about Python he said that in some time you could probably expect to write a piece of code that returns a function in a way that is really close to the latest implementation, about 15 years later. That actually surprised me a lot, that someone could predict that kind of thing is really unexpected, it made me believe much more in the things he was saying, that all languages where asymptotically reaching the limit presented by Lisp. I wish that by the end of this semester I can finally understand what all the fuss is about and why it matt...
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Beating the Averages

What I found to be the best about this article was that it made me realize that the opinion that Lisp (or in the case of this course Clojure) may have the possibility of being a completely different experience to programming than what I'm used to, which is a good thing because I did think, or more exactly I still think most programming languages are mostly the same, with different approaches to certain things and different things you can do "out of the box" but still, mostly the same structure and syntax. I am the kind of person that thinks that if you have learned any programming language (maybe of the most common/popular ones) you have learned all. Therefore I'm kinda excited to see what Clojure has to offer. Apart from that it was fun to read, I always find interesting articles from the time when the internet was still a new thing and having 500 clients in an online startup was a great thing. It's just fun to see how the world has changed so fast that an articl...
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The semicolon wars

I found this article very, I wouldn't say informative but, entertaining. It felt like the type of thing that is said as a joke at tech, specially programming and hacking, conventions. Although I was a bit disappointed that "The semicolon wars" where just a tiny reference and not the real topic, even if it probably was better of that way. Apart from that, I also found that it said a lot of things that I've witnessed, at least in the programming communities I've been part of over the last years, although of course a bit blown up for the sake of publishing (I'd guess). It is my belief that any passionate programmer has thought at least once, and probably a lot more than that "Why hasn't a programming language that mixes the best of X, Y and Z languages been made" hoping to meld the best of the handful of programming languages he likes the most. Like that's going to solve all of the little, or big, annoyances he finds while working. And I really ...
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Who am I? I'm an ISC student in 6th semester. I don't really know what to expect from this class, apart from the obvious "to learn something interesting". My hobbies include: snowboarding, competitive programming, gaming, and most contact sports. Some of the movies/series that I've enjoyed recently are: Star Wars The last Jedi, The Greatest Showman and Jumanji
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