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