Blog 2-3: The Secret History Of Women in Coding

When we talk about computer science, it is awful that sexism, racism and this kind of topics came in. Men and woman are equal in all sort of things, specifically in the ability of solving and thinking solutions to mathematical problems or programming problems.

This article shows us that in the beginning, coders were mostly women because of the maleness of the epoch. But thanks to all the woman that participate as coders we are where we are. Thanks to all that women working hard every day and every night we are here now.

Historically the idea of women treating with computers and coding was common, but when computers gained popularity this idea change drastically. First this kind of things was only (or mostly) for women, with the arrive of personal computers, coding and treat with computers were mostly for men.

This goes so on and so on, in my opinion I think that we need to take out the stupid idea of programming is only for one gender when it is for any gender, any people who wants to develop its life in this topic. In the career this thing it is a little bit notorious, there are more men than women studying computer science (at least on my semester there are only 3 women).

If you ask me, I think that it is time to let go all the stereotypes of our career, that its only for men, that its only for people that are introverts or people that loves anime. It is a career for all people that wants to study this. Also, we need to contribute with our grain of sand and make a better world for all people. Finally, I hope that in the future could be 50% of women and men in the career and collaborate in constructing and excellent inclusive community.

Blog 2-2: Roots of Lisp

As we know, John McCarthy build a whole programming language, the name of that language is Lisp, but why it is call Lisp; Lips stands for, List Processing. The reason it is call Lisp it is because one of its key ideas was to use a simple fata structure called list for both, code and data.

In our course of Programming Languages, we are seeing a flavor of Lisp but not Lisp per se. Clojure is a functional programming that has its bases in the Lisp definition. Nevertheless, Clojure is more understandable than Lisp. In the next lines I will explain why I think this.

Lisp has seven primitive operators where we can find the following ones:

·      Atom: sequence of letters, or a list of zero or more expressions.

·      Quote: it returns x, in Clojure and Lisp it has a macro to express the same thing by only using the char “ ‘ “.

·      Eq: verifies if the two arguments are atoms or lists.

·      Car: returns the first element of the given list (in Clojure this function is first).

·      Cdr: returns the list without the first element of the given list (in Clojure this function is rest).

·      Cons: adds the element x to the beginning of the list.

·      Cond: it is a conditional that evaluates the expressions given.

In the next pages of the paper the author explains the different ways of how you can denote functions and all the related stuff for this subject. Nevertheless, Clojure is miles away simpler and readable than the common Lisp at least when we talk about functions, because I did not understand a thing of the function definition.

However, I agree with the author that the functional programming languages are the future of the developing because of all the features that functional programming haves, like the immutability of the data or the data persistency. Finally, it is not simple to understand Lisp or Clojure but if you dedicate some time to study the language you will find it funny and powerfull.