Language as the Ultimate Weapon




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 programming language. He doesn’t have other choices than to use what the language can offer him in terms of words. We can make the comparison with Orwell’s novel when the Party slowly takes out words of Oldspeak language because it wants to erase thoughts about crimes for example. When someone creates a new programming language he chooses the syntax, keywords, grammar that the language will be based on. 
In another way he chooses how programmers will use it. We can also make a comparison with Orwell’s novel when the Party creates the new language Newspeak to empower themselves towards the population. 

To conclude, I would say that it is relevant to a student taking this course to read Orwell’s novel because programmers need to be aware about the power that programming languages have. They need to use them wisely in order to express what they really want.

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