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Clase 10 - “Revenge of the Nerds”

“Revenge of the Nerds” The first thing I find curious about this article is that it does not consider Lisps as a programming language if not as an idea or even more as a theory. The author compares Lisps to the mathematical discovery that as we have found out over history become more relevant instead of obsolete. at least this was the idea of   McCarthy who never intended to implement the eval function.  After reading the 9 new ideas of Lisp the one that most resonated and made my mind run was number 8. Especially when the author mentions that this aspect enables programs to create programs, this idea now we know as AI. So it is quite impressive that without any idea that machine learning and IA technology were possible Lisps is made to execute them. Today we are pushing every day for programs to be more independent and as of now we already have programs that write programs that no human can understand. Still considering all the good and cool things that Lisps has to offer I still have
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Clase 9 - “Are We There Yet?”

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Clase 8 - “A New Age of JVM Garbage Collectors”

 “A New Age of JVM Garbage Collectors” In this exposition, the presenter talks first about why a garbage collector is necessary for any programing language. And to be honest for any programmer understanding this is quite basic and can be resumed to 2 phrases. All programs generate united use of memory and memory is a finite resource. So for these 2 simple reasons we need a garbage collector.  Now to get into the juicy part of the presentation we are going to analyze the different types of garbage collectors that are presented. The first and more basic one is manual memory management; it is hard to even consider this a garbage collector as it is done by the user. It is mostly used in the C language and works with a pointer to allocate and deallocate memory.  Getting now into more interesting garbage collectors, the next model is Automatic reference counting. This model is based on keeping track of how many times an object is referenced. As long as there is one reference the allocation h
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Clase 7 - “Rich Hickey on Clojure”

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Clase 6 -- “The Roots of Lisp”

 “The Roots of Lisp” I found the initial introduction of the article very simple and concrete, they present the basic functions of the LISP language in a self-contained and comprehensible way. As mentioned in the introduction it is quite amazing that the whole lisp languages are based on only these seven primitive operations. (quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons, and cond). This basic operation is the whole foundation of the LISP language this is what makes it so special and approximates this language to a more mathematical sense than other actual languages. This is what gives a very bright future to Lisp-like languages in the future. After this, the author presents the definition for function in LISPS. For this, he presents 2 functions lambda and label for recursive functions. After this, the author procedures to create several more functions based on these 2 basic notations. Also, functions start building in newly defined functions extremely fast, and just like this some of the most comm
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Clase 5 - Dick Gabriel on Lisp

 Clase 5 - Dick Gabriel on Lisp I find it very interesting that the creation of the LISP language was based on artificial intelligence, and especially how the compiler was created. It was not just built-in 1 night but it was hand compiled and basically became the complier for all future lisps programs. This compiler function called EVAL and it’s a metacircular compiler because it is written itself in LISP which was quite astonishing at that time. It seems that LISP had a very similar evolution to many other languages but it always found a way to generalize and be different. It started with the creation of specialized languages for each topic. Then it went into macros and object-oriented programing with Scheme and other variants. What I found wired is that they always returned to the same idea that everything is a function and keep on building on that whole idea of lists and functions as basic elements of the language. In the podcast, it was hard to understand in deep all the terms but
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Clase 4 The Secret History of Women in Coding

 Clase 4 The Secret History of Women in Coding The Secret History of Women in Coding Reading the history of computing and how women were so involved has been surprising. As I would expect the opposite of what happened. That woman would not have had a chance to be part of the industry until more recent times. Still, the saddest part is that what followed was nothing new not just in computing but in all aspects of the economy. The reality that women were systematically and intentionally undermined at every corner. The worst part of reading this article is to see how until today we as an industry keep discriminating against several groups like Latinos, blacks, and women. Not just that if not it seems we are worse than other industries. I can see these every day I go to study, I think I have never been in a class with more than 10 women present. This is quite surprising as I think in my university there must be a very similar proportion of men and women enrolled. So, this leaves only an
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