Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The key growth of any company is think of the future. Technology is advancing too fast so if you have a company dedicated to technology with a good idea, you should look for improve the idea or, think of anything else, you never settle for something. This is what happened to IBM, a technology company that had to suffer to adapt to change and to be on par with the competition.

IBM employees had to find a quick solution if they wanted to stay alive in the market, Apple had launched its first laptops which were being successful in the marking. The solution was of an IBM employee, rather than manufacture the computer components, they buy them and in this way they could save production time and could have their product ready quickly.

IBM did not count that they were going to need a language and an operating system for their computers, so they decidet to contact to Bill Gates. Bill Gates was one of the few people who had a language to interpret the instructions of computers, such language was developed by him and then he developed his own operating system.

The IBM mistake was be overconfident, luckily they were able to stay in business and today are a strong company in the technology field. What this video made me think is that we must exploit all our ideas, I do not know if Bill Gates is right about that after  30 years of age the good ideas end up, but if this is right, we must seize our age.

Finally we can not ignore the creativity of IBM, their repertoire of songs is so funny, in addition to they have their own dress code, which we can not forget the socks fasteners, if we want to enter their offices.

Revenge of the Nerds

Every programming language has its purpose or its strong point. What with a language programming can do it more or less acceptable time, with another can perform it faster and efficiently. Depending on the requirements of the program is that you must choose the language that suits us.

Seems to me amazing how LIPS being a language that was created ago many years (60 years to be exact) and, it is today considered such a powerful language, due to the way that it  was developed. I agree that when a new language is developed, you should think ahead, not only trying to solve the problem that we have in front, and that not only we must consider when creating new languages, but rather to everything, for example when a program is being developed.

Another important aspect that it can be highlighted of the article is that it gives us an advice, whenever we are developing something, we have to think of the customer, we must design our programs to please the client, because if we win the customers confidence, we will have more opportunities to grow as a new company.

Something that is true, LIPS is a comfortable language in a matter of that, usually, the programs developed are short in terms of lines of code. Another advantage of LISP is that it has an extensive library where you find methods for almost everything, without having to implement it on your own, so you can focus on other aspects of the program rather than on simple things like sort something.

Of this article we can conclude that any decision on what language we must use should be based on the approach of the company and competition, you can not define if one language is better than another, but experience in the development industry will help us to choose the one that suits us.

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

I felt a lot of curious about to know about the life of Dick Gabriel, for this motive I decided to research about his life. His real name is Richard P. Gabriel and is an important American computer specialist, who was born in 1949 in Merrimac, a small city located to the north of Massachisetts.

His main contributions to the computer industry was the work related to the Lisp programming language. Many trials done by him, relate his experience with language, and shows a comparison with other different languages (benchmark).

He was nearly accepted to MIT and Hardvard, but an argument with a teacher ended those prospects, and he ended up going to Northeastern University, where he earned a B. A. in Mathematics. Afterward, he persued gradueted studies in mathematics al MIT but, funding difficulties made it impossible to retain him. Finally, he was able to carry out their research at the University of Standford, where he was finally accepted.

Gabriel tells that one of the main uses of the Lisp language occurs in artificial intelligence projects, since language has a lot of resources and properties which, making a comparison with other languages, it is more comfortable and easier to develop using this language.

Gabriel explains that Lips includes structured data, besides implementing functional programming. It is said that Lips was the first and only language that allowed to implement functional programming in the age in which it was created. One of the characteristics of functional programming is that you can change a value in the memory location which reference variables.

Another issue that was mentioned in the potcast is CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System which is part of Lips focused on programming object-oriented such as classes and methods. CLOS has powerful tools which are understood to conforming are implemented.