TEC - Programming Languages 2018 - Irene

Rich Hickey is the creator of the Lisp programming language: Clojure (first version in 2007). The 22th of March 2010, he was interviewed on the Software engineering radio (radio dedicated to professional software developers). In this episode, Rich Hickey tells us that he did not start programming with Lisp, but with famous programming languages such as C++, C# and Java. Lisp is not new, it has been used in some domains successfully (in artificial intelligence for example) but don’t have a main stream. In respond of this, Rich Hickey says that Lisp was not designed as a main stream language and that it was designed for super users, researchers and very smart people who wanted to solve very hard and different kind of problems. Furthermore, programming has become like a social activity: More and more people are using Lisp, but nowadays most of the users are still scientists and researchers. However, for Rich Hickey: « every programmer with a good open mind will find working with t

The article  “Revenge of the Nerds”  has been written by Paul Graham in 2002. I want to start this comment by citing the author: « You can't let the suits make technical decisions for you. ». This sentence sums up very well the thoughts  of the author in this article. The author mostly talks about the power of programming languages and indeed most people do not know the different features of the programming languages and that they cannot solve the same kind of problem. One of the biggest mistakes of the high-level people in software companies is that they sometimes make decisions according to the actual trend instead of finding the best technology and have an optimal solution to develop their application. They also think that choosing one of the most famous programming languages, like java for example, will be an advantage for the project because everyone knows how to code in Java and it will be easy to replace programmers if necessary. This solution

Dick Gabriel is an American computer scientist and is known for his work and researches related on Lisp. The 22th of January 2008, he was interviewed on the Software engineering radio (radio dedicated to professional software developers). On this podcast, Dick Gabriel would like to prove to listeners that Lisp is a programming language that is worth it. He starts by introducing himself and presenting his career. One thing that immediately surprised me is the fact that this man made poetry and he still loves it. On one hand we can think that programming and poetry are part of different domains but on the other hand, both are a linked to an art form: programmers imagine and create programs and each program is unique, and it is the same with poetry. The combination of programming and art is for me a good way to develop our programming capacities. This combination helped Dick Gabriel in his domain: the artificial intelligence. Dick Gabriel also talks about the features of Lisp