TEC - Programming Language 2018 - Luca Z

The article “Language as the Ultimate Weapon” written by Jem Berkes basically analyses Orwell’s novel called “Nineteen Eighty-Four” about the use of the language and the impact this one can have on a society. In Orwell’s novel « Nineteen Eighty-Four”, the Party is trying to completely replace the common language of that time that is called Oldspeak by a new one called Newspeak. This new language aims to erase thoughtcrime. Through all his novel, Orwell shows how the media can use the language to mask the truth.  It is a novel that is all about psychological control of the public. The Party is interested in masking the truth by lies and propaganda. The most obvious example is the media that refers to different Ministries of Truth and Love for example but the first one often falsifies records which is an illegal activity. In my opinion Orwell’s novel is relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course because it shows the importance of the use of a language in

The article ‘The Roots of Lisp’ was written by Paul Graham and treats about the beginning of the language Lisp. He translates how John McCarthy created the language in 1960.  The first discovery he made is that he would need to define some operators based on mathematic expressions and the main data structure: list. He started by defining what an expression is. It can either be an atom (sequence of letter) or a list. From this he defined seven primitive operators: quote, atom, eq, acr, cdr, cons and cond.  Then he defines a notation for describing functions and functions calls. In this part he explains how expressions are computed, in which order parameters or operators are evaluated. Something that I have learned is that we can abbreviate some expressions when we use function composition. For example we can write (car (cdr e)) this way : (cadr e). All these functions use mostly one type of data structure : lists.  Besides performing operations on lists, some functions c

This article « The Promises of Functional Programming » was written by Konrad Hinsen and as its title suggests, prones the benefits of functional programming. The author starts by stating the history of software programming and the different techniques used for this. Functional programming has some advantages especially in concurrency and parallel programming. It can also be used to solve problems in mathematical modeling.  The basic concept of functional programming is that computations are made by composing functions. In other kinds of programming, functions are used to return a value. Another interesting point in functional programming is the rare use of variables. Indeed functions don’t often change the value of variables, they process computations. We can notice another difference between functional programming and regular programming. Abstractions in functional programming is prominent because functions are considered as being data. The use of higher-order functio