The semicolon wars

Entry 27:
The parenthesis are closing in on us I fear we wont be able to see the next week, if anyone finds this diary please be sure that we fought with all our strength but the power of the parenthesis was too much. It looks like clojure wasn't a place for us.
Sargent Semicolon.

Bad jokes aside and addressing the lecture one thing that really interested me about this lecture is that along the way of my discovery of programming and programming languages i have always met with people telling me: "This language is the best one", "You should really drop that language and use this", well, maybe not so directly but that was the idea, and although i really thought this was a more recent problem, because there are so many languages and a lot of them can do the same things just in a different manner, i never realized until now that this occurred since the beginning of programming i knew that there were some programming languages back then but as they were developing more and some of there were focused in different areas like COBOL for business or FORTRAN for science y never thought this would be quite a discussion or "war" as the article calls it back then.

I really like one idea that the author mentions in this publication when it says "Raw computational power is not what people care about in a programming language; the real criterion is how readily you can express your ideas" and i think this is a really good thing about programming languages, even though a lot of languages can to the same things the way it is able to do it and the way we are able to make that happen really plays an important factor in which programming languages we like to use or we even need to use and if we  think about it this is a really important practice because its something we even do with spoken languages, we may not choose different languages for different things, well maybe finding information when you know other languages may be a very useful thing, but when expressing ourselves we need to find the best way to do so as we are not going to talk in a very complex way and with a very scientific vocabulary if we are trying to explain how does a plane work to a little kid.

Finally i just want to say that Dijkstra truths were very funny i may not know if they are a very good opinion about the languages he talks about, but saying something like Students exposed to BASIC "are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" makes easy to believe there was going to be a real programming languages war.

Side-note: The author may love LISP but i don't think the English language needs more parenthesis at least for the moment.


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