Triumph of the Nerds Part II

Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The second part of the documentary Triumph of the nerds is about how Microsoft started the way to create the most used operating system in the world.

Is fun because all started with IBM, and their city and the obsession of wear white shirts with starched collars and garters on the legs to keep the socks high, and the strange  book full of songs called, "Songs of IBM.", it was a little scary, but, taking the idea again, all start with IBM but because Apple. (is fun, the formal IBM and the oposite Microsoft and their “nerds”)

I want to say thanks because the need of IBM of take a piece of the computer market and all the things they do not consider are needed for make a computer. Buy everything made all the process faster but also made easier to make a copy for the rivals, I mean, if you want to be the only company selling in this case computers, you need to be sure all you do is unrepeatable and of course consider what your allies think and even if it is a little frightening prevent them support your competition.

And thinking about Microsoft, is fun, I never believe Bill Gates will give chance to another company to do a job they could do. I supose as they dont have exactly or even something similary they did not wanto to take the job but Microsoft was lucky, the skeleton of what they need cost a few dollars compared with the empire that now represents.

Of the documentary I can rescue the next:

·       Reverse engineering is cool.

·       Think out of the box.

·       Take challenges.

·       Be kind but do not give second chances.

·       Be careful, you can buy everything but everyone else can do the same.

·       Sometimes you win and sometimes you are teh best but only in mainframe.

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Why lisp?

LISP has among its features a metacircular interpreter what actually means that it is posible for lisp to evaluates itself, and it give us options that other laguages don´t have.

Another characteristic really interesting is the posibility of make macros, this is usefull because in simple words   are programs that build others programs .

And, of course, it is functional, all the result of a function can be evaluated for other function and make the language more complete, it ads features for the programs and all this is used like part of the original language.

Oh ok, i was forgetting something Dick Gabriel said that lis is an amazing option to code basically because in it is easy to put he ideas into code and possibly the reason of why lisp  has been used to write artificial inteligence programs or robotics features and coding take less time.

One of the troubles with lisp and derivate languages, cof cof clojure, is, nope i am not talking of the incredible number of parenthesis, the strange way of using the lists, well almost everything is a list, I supose its easy for a machine use a list and take the arguments in order and make procesing more efficient.

Why is not all the world using lisp?

As Dick Gabriel mentioned it has strange name for the things and uses lists, I mean, it is ok if you are in research but  for developement it is hard to imagine a way, ironical once you known lisp inspired ruby, one of the most used languages for web developement.
But taking the question again, I supose is because it takes not a lot of time but enough to decide jut use other language you already have used and make a class or objects and not think in a different way of the usual.