The Programming Languages Blog

This article was written by Clive Thompson and published on the NY Times magazine on this past February, it is about hoy women have contributed to the computer science history, specifically about one woman whose name is Mary Allen Wilkes. Mary Allen had no idea what a computer programmer was, she didn’t even knew what programming was, she had just hear about those things, but never really put much attention to it, she wanted to be a lawyer, an attorney, and she wanted to be a good one, unfortunately she was always told that she would be doomed to be only a secretary, a legal assistant or something related, however, she went one day to the MIT (where computers where just arriving) and asked for a job as programmer, even though she didn’t have any experience she was hired (mainly because by that time experience in programming was non-existent). By the time Mary Allen was a programmer, she had to write code in paper and translate the code into holes in a card, an...

The roots of Lisp article was written back in 2002 by Paul Graham, it mainly discuss how John McCarthy started working with operations and notations that would eventually become ‘Lisp’, which is the abbreviation of List Processing, According to the article, Lisp was created following the rules of John McCarthy, right at Lisp, we have seven ‘primitive’ operators: quote, atom, eq, car, cons, cond and cdr, all these together are the reason why the writer mentions that Lisp writes itself, the programming makes the program, as obvious as it might sound, the background of the true meaning is much deeper, in Lisp functions are expressed with parameters and expressions. Paul Graham assures that the only two consistent programming languages have been C and Lisp, also assuring that on the next (at least back then) twenty years all the programming languages would have taken Lisp and C as their core models or bases and just adding new functions or qualities, and it has be...

The constant evolution of software and technology is the main cause of many procedures, architectures and methodologies in software development, as of today, the options of methodologies a team of developers can use to approach a problem is insanely wide, this has become an advantage when trying to solve particular problems or design specific algorithms and has make teams more flexible when designing or making a solution. Over all this options, there is one particular that has been proven to be really accurate and precise, is called ‘Pair programming’ or ‘Xtreme Programming’ which consist on a team of 2 people (pair) working together on the same code and at the same time, same algorithm and problem, making it a 2-mind 1-laptop approach, although this might appear to be inefficient and poorly designed, it turns out it has been widely tested and really successful. The reasons behind the success of this approach is actually pretty simple, two minds think better t...