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Triumph of the Nerds Part II

We are revisiting the series triumph of the nerds obviously this time watching the second part and I just have to start saying the same thing I said when we saw for the first time the triumph of the nerd series with the first part, nerds rule and I love that fact that a lot of their success wasn’t completely out of wanting to get rich but doing what they were good at and what the loved. Saying that I liked how this part focused mainly on reverse engineering and how people were able to replicate the ROM BIOS but the part that was more interesting in my opinion was the one that talked about Compaq and how they did this same thing but to be able to reverse engineer the ROM BIOS one person should look and see everything it could do and how it did it and write what requirements it had but he couldn’t work on it because his mind was “dirty” so the other guys from the team needed to work on creating a system that could do exactly everything described by their partner without actually knowing
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Language as the Ultimate Weapon and my review of 1984

Ok I am going to talk about George Orwell novel 1984 and because of that if you haven’t read it I don’t know what are you doing wasting your time, that is a book everyone should read and I feel bad for not doing it earlier and having to wait for someone to force me to do it, thanks professor Ariel. Well 1984 it’s a dense book in my opinion because it really makes you think on the world it shows you and how it would be if our world was like that or if we were in an scenario as the novel shows us. The point of the psychological control based on the vocabulary as the novel shows us and as it is remarked in the article “ Language as the ultimate weapon ” it’s scary, really scary because you see it on the book and you think, if that happened in real life would I be able to tell the difference and oppose to it or would it be so subtle I would begin to embrace without even paying attention and when the article makes the comparison to politics and how they do something in that area that
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The Promises of Functional Programming... and my struggle to learn that this promises are good

Oh functional programming, you are good, you are very good, after all this time in this Programming Languages course I can see why some people praise you and how convenient you can be depending on what we are trying to do. The article “The Promises of Functional Programming” doesn’t lie in its title and it really talks about how different and good are the things you can do and the way they work in a functional language like Lisp, or Clojure and the way the article presents them make you think (if you didn’t knew about functional programming before) that this way of programming its easier, better, even more elegant and at that point you may think why haven’t I heard from it before and why am I not using it, well the answer may be (maybe not, maybe it’s just me) in that changing your way of thinking, your way of programming coming from a background of a more imperative programming such as an object oriented paradigm can be kind of hard and frustrating at the beginning. One of the fi
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Rich Hickey on Clojure

Well, first of all its fun to hear another podcast from the same show as we did when we were hearing dick Gabriel on Lisp, then we were hearing from an expert we could say on the topic (Lisp), but now we are hearing about the language, in this case Clojure, from the own creator of the language which makes things a little bit more interesting in my opinion. Some things talked about in the podcast we have learned through the course but hearing why it works that way and the thought put behind that as to why make the language work that way is what made the podcast really interesting. One think I really liked is the realization which I really didn’t paid attention, although is obvious, until listening to this podcast, is that we have the power of Java thanks to the java virtual machine without the language being java itself, but we also have the power of Lisp as Clojure is a dialect of lisp and in my opinion that makes Clojure a really powerful language and also a very simple one
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Triumph of the Nerds Part I

After watching this video during class some reason I started to think, most of the people that study the same thing I do, Computer engineering, are nerds but I know a lot of them that don’t like being called one or try to hide that, not most of them but there are cases of it, and I think those people should really watch this documentary because why would you hate being called a nerd when these people, Wozniak, Bill Gates, the whole Homebrew Computer Club achieved what they have now, some of them even being billionaires or millionaires by being nerds and doing what they like, we can see in the video how the computer and the development of it wasn’t made because some pointy haired boss decided that somebody should invent that or develop that to be able to sell it and make money and the same thing with the software when the computer was developed, it started because some guys that we can call nerds had constant reunions where they developed their own machines to try to impress their frie
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Opinion "Revenge of the Nerds"

First of all I have to say sorry, I haven’t watched revenge of the nerds and if there is any reference to the movie in the text I don’t know where they are, but hey, when the movie was release I wasn’t even born yet so there’s that. Well now to the topic, as the author points out in the text languages power vary and I think when someone jumps in the bandwagon of only one language is the best for everything really needs to reevaluate their knowledge as a programmer, I’m not saying you can’t have a favorite language and you can’t use one language for everything you do, I mean you can and if that makes you more comfortable and your efficiency improves I think that’s ok, but now acknowledging that there a programing languages that are better than other for certain task it’s what I think is wrong, as the author of the text tells us you don’t want to be the pointy haired boss that thinks he knows everything even though he knows damn well he knows nothing about programming. Talking a
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Opinion on "Dick Gabriel on Lisp"

Just as a quick comment before starting talking about the podcast i really enjoyed the song that was played at the end of the podcast i may not be a fan of Lisp at the moment because Clojure is a new language to me and a whole new form of programming, as Lisp is a functional language, and i have always worked with Object Oriented languages like C++ or Java but the song in some way makes you like Lisp a little bit more as it says "God wrote in Lisp" i find it very funny as everywhere i look they tell us Lisp is a very powerful language. Addressing the podcast the first thing that really sparked my interest is the important role Lisp has played in artificial intelligence because i didn't knew that it was the main language used to research and develop in this area and i think is an area that really needs to keep developing even though as today it is the center of many discussions and debates as we can see an example with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Also i really
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