Revenge of the Nerds

Again, we have another approach on which is the best programming language, now considering the efficiency on resolving certain problems better than in other languages.

Paul Graham describes a character that his development of software is written in whatever programming standard by the time. The pointy-haired boss thinks that all programming languages are equal, and this is a fatal mistake. In this article we can learn that many of the actual languages are integrating lisp like functionalities and becoming more powerful.

From the article we can learn that in the past, programming languages did not support recursion. So, Lisp was one of the first programming languages that started using it. Graham says that the syntax of Lisp is friendly because we can write a great amount of code using less lines.

Something that surprise me was the fact that Lisp starts as a theorical exercise by McCarthy but after that one of his students decided to traduce it into machine language and he finally create a compiler. It was created as math not as a technology, and that´s why it is difficult to get obsolete.

In this article we read some other features that we have learned before from Lisp, as its macros. But there was an interesting idea, even if you build the most powerful macro you can not claim that you invented a new programming language, you just have created a new dialect of Lisp.

Graham mentioned three problems of using a less common programming language:

1.- The programs written in that language may not work well with programs written in other languages

2.- Probably there are less libraries

3.- Maybe it is difficult to find programmers that use that language

I learned a lot from this article, with every article I believe that we learn more from this programming language called Lisp.