Language as the Ultimate Weapon

Why is the 1984 novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?, this is a question that can be answered using the article written by Jem Berkes, Language as the ultimate weapon in 1984.

The novel told us what happen today in the media, talking about the use of languages, we are manipulated subtly to a certain way of thought. A language is a social construct, but also a human thing, one thing that the novel and the article have in common is the Power concept.

Language is a very powerful weapon that can be better than torture because it can be continuously applied to the public without raising great public opposition or fear. Society is being bombarded with oppression without feeling it directly.

“Media is powerful as a tool for manipulation both because the public is widely exposed to it, and because the public trusts it”. (Berkey)

A comparison between the 1984 novel and the article is that in the novel there is a dystopian language called Newspeak where English is reduced to fool the nation so as to obey a party and just use certain words that might never affect them, and this is like a Lisp dialect, Clojure.

In an ordinary context, language is a weapon that can be used for good, in 1984 novel, Orwell shows us how it can also be used to control an entire society and make it think as we want to.

Now, trying to answer the main question I think that we are studying programming languages, and even if programming languages and natural languages are not the same, they have a great number of things in common. We expand our vision of programming and we understand easily implementations in languages beyond our knowledge. We must fight the ignorance imposed to us as the novel recommend us