TEC - Programming Languages 2018 - Irene

The article “Language as the Ultimate Weapon”, written by Jem Berkes, gives us a good review of Orwell’s novel. In this article, Jem Berkes concentrates his thoughts on the way the Party uses language as a very powerful weapon that controls the population. The Party manipulates it by using propaganda and lies. How is Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?  At first, I don’t see in what way it could be. But then I thought a little more about it and I realized that programming languages can be compared to linguistic languages. A language by definition is defined by words which has a specific definition. A programming language is similar. It consists of different keywords that have specific meanings. A language is already defined so a programmer uses these words (functions, characters…) to express his thoughts (solve problems). In a certain way a programmer is stuck in this virtual world of a program

In this article, the author Paul Graham tells the history (“the roots”) of the programming language Lisp. John McCarthy has built Lisp in 1958 with only few simple operators and a notation for functions. The name Lisp is a mix of the words “List” and “Processing”. Full of mockery was made because of the use of many parentheses in the Lisp syntax, giving a funny acronym for LISP: "Lots of Irritating and Silly Parentheses". Because of its expressiveness and flexibility, Lisp had a lot of success in the artificial intelligence community. For the author, there are 2 unavoidable models nowadays: The C and Lisp programming languages, which influence the most recent languages (Most of the time, they are composed of a C base with adding Lisps parts, like runtime typing and garbage collection). Paul Graham also explains how John McCarthy obtained his new model of computation by creating functions ( eval) . Lisp is a language that does not distinguish between "expression

This article has been written by Konrad Hinsen. It talks about the history of programming languages and explains why functional programming is different from traditional programming. Programming has changed a lot and will continue to evolve: with all the new technologies that appeared over decades, new languages have been created (through assembly language to problem-oriented programming languages). Needs have evolved, programming languages have multiplied and programming approaches also: Functional programming has been growing in interest because it is considered more robust, compact and easily parallelizable (this means that computational tasks are divided into multiple communicating processes running in parallel) and testable. It is the realization of computations by composing functions (with input values and output values), but functional programming does not have variables because functions are not supposed to change any variable; and uses recursion instead of loops. Fu