"Language as the Ultimate Weapon in Nineteen Eighty-Four" - Personnal Comments

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 general. Expressing thoughts through a language is extremely powerful as explained in the article. People need to be aware of this and be careful when they want to express an idea. 

In computer science I would say that a programming language has many features and it is easy to accomplish a task by different ways. We have seen in this course different ways to solves problems. First, we discovered Clojure’s recursion and then we were introduced to functions that we ale to compute an operation of every element of a list (for example the function map). 

A programmer needs to take in consideration many variables (such as processing power, execution time, memory resources) before starting to solve a problem. One approach can have different impacts that another one. 

In a more global sense, different languages have advantages and disadvantage and programmers need to think of which language they should use for different projects and tasks.