Blog Entry: Language as the Ultimate Weapon

Ignorance or even the lack of knowledge something powerful to control masses, or that is the main object for novel like 1984 from George Orwell. Manipulating others in different ways without using the violence is something that puts a complete authority against people.

On the novel violence is not the way they apply this oppression for the people, Orwell created a "dystopian" world where psychology plays an important role, in Oceania a tyrannist political group known as "Big Brother" promotes to people to believe everything they provide as information is real and this motivates them to be proud of the system.

Inside the novel there is something called "Newspeak" that is a simplification of English language (they refer as Oldspeak) where vocabulary that is not necessary is eliminated. This helps to control people language and affect memories from person's (so they cannot remember most of them) or even provokes and affects the way a person could express what they think.

Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?

This helps us to understand that language is always changing even for good or bad, in computing, programming gets updates or even newer versions, language is in constant movement and even if we have the same programming language, we get different versions where syntaxes or even libraries are different.

Clojure is the right example of the previous paragraph, LISP is the original programming language and Clojure we can call it an update or a different way to program based on LISP language.

On the other hand, we got Python where we get updates from different versions (2.x, 3.x, etc.) and the syntaxes is different, but its capability is even bigger so we can create even new programs with more features.

We need to be in constant change, adapt and also learn the new changes, it's the same as technology it evolves we can create and do more things, we get more tools and also, we are open to new languages.

As a conclusion the book and programming gets a connection between them, language is universal and something that helps to communicate, language from person to person and on the other hand programming language from person to machine have too many elements in common.

Something that I would like to add, this is not the first time I experienced (over a book, movie, series, game, etc.) this kind of oppression for a society or a country, I would like to recommend Mirror's Edge and its sequel Mirror's Edge Catalyst, even though the story is told by a person who delivers packages over rooftops (they are called runners on the game), it describes the oppression that society lives on that universe.

To finish this blog entry, I would like to add a video from a different way to suppress a person's vocabulary via nanomachines, it could be a game, but if the reality comes to this close, maybe it’s not a crazy idea to use this method. This is from the Videogame Metal Gear Solid from Hideo Kojima (previously with Konami), on the game instead of using the word "Patriots" (referred to United States government) because of the censorship of the word, the soldiers can only say "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo".

References:

Berkes, J. (May, 2000). Language as the "Ultimate Weapon. Scientific. Programming in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Retrieve on march 18th, 2018 from:

http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/s201811/tc2006/language_ultimate_weapon.html

Orwell, G. (2007) 1984. D.F., Mexico, Editorial Porrua (English version, 1949).

Blog Entry: The Roots of LISP

This blog entry is a little different to the ones that I've recently published through the course, it also helps to give a point of view of how the course has progressed from my point of view and not only for learning a new programming language but also as an opportunity to understand a different way to solve problems.

I would like to talk in this blog entry about my experience with Clojure and also that is related to LISP language (and the reading too, because most of the reading is about some expressions created by John McCarthy, in some way what I can see is that Clojure was based on an interesting language that is LISP, creating elements over Lists is something that is not normally used in traditional programming but in this case demonstrates that it can be solved with vectors and lists, I consider that solving problems with this kind of method looks like something that even with mathematical problems with traditional could be solved, but in this I think that using a language like LISP or Clojure could be easier or even faster (without consuming too many elements of the system) than programming a full program on Java or even on C, we know that these languages works closely as a high level programming, but why not use something that is dedicated to these kind of problems?

Well, it's possible and what I can see here is that learning ways to create functions where solving problems that goes from a Fibonacci sequence to a simple addition could be easier than it looks, even creating recursive functions (something that could be complicated on traditional) helps to solve the problem with more elements on the list.

It's true that we already learned the basic elements and an API to use for solving problems, I would like to learn more things about Clojure not only during this semester, but also for the next months as an opportunity to learn more stuff or even learn the original one that is LISP.



One more thing as an special mention (meanwhile I was working on this blog and reading). Congratulations to Guillermo del Toro for winning Best Movie and Best Director with the Shape of Water on the Oscar awards, something that demonstrates and shows that mexicans can supass its limits and with hard work we can create things that is something to talk here in Mexico and across the world.