Comments on "The triumph of the Nerds Part II"

Bill Gates and his colleagues made Microsoft giant in the world of computers, this mainly because he was a visionary that had an ideal and the attitude to make this dream come true. A company like Microsoft didn’t become as huge as we know it today just from scratch, it had its key points and even luck. Bill Gates was lucky enough to make his idea and dream come true, even with other people competing against him and being under the shadow of a giant company like IBM was at the time.

When Bill Gates started Microsoft many people though it was impossible to overcome such an Enterprise as IBM was at the time, nobody could imagine that a startup company that had started at a student’s residence could be so powerful and even more powerful than the giants in power.

Of course, there were other competitors in the same race, which is the case of Apple, when Steve Jobs was developing a computer business, similar to what Bill Gates was trying to accomplish, the key difference between Bill Gates success compared to Steve Jobs, was that Bill Gates wasn’t trying to build a computer from scratch, as Steve Jobs was, Gates dedicated his time to develop the software that IBMs computers and all other computer manufacturers in the future will use to make such computers useful to everyone.

The most important moment and key factor of Bill Gates career as a startup company, was when he sold the right of using his operating system to IBM, but with an agreement that he could sell to whoever else he wanted, so when IBM started using Microsoft software it become a necessity for the other computer manufacturers and Microsoft became a company in power of the market and had control of how companies like IBM could grow.

This key factor made Bill Gates and Microsoft the most valuable company and today remains one of the most valuable companies of the world.

Comments on "Revenge of the Nerds"

Many times, people don’t really know the difference between programming languages and just believe that the most popular languages are the best, this is clearly a case of ignorance. A programming language doesn’t make it a better programming language just because it has more funding than other languages, or some programming languages may be better for solving certain problems than other languages. In most of the cases people that are not in the computer development industry don’t understand and say the better language is the one they have heard the most. This happens a lot with Java, since Java is a well-known language in the media, because it is a recent and well-funded language. This doesn’t mean it’s the best language that is out there.

For example, Java was born to fix certain problems that C++ had, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a better language, in some cases each of them can be better for solving certain problems, and this goes on with all the different gamma of languages in the industry. The key is to know for what circumstances each language will become a better solution for a given problem.

Now talking about Lisp, even though Lisp is an old language it was one of the first languages of its kind, as a matter of fact, it was the first language to implement recursion and remains one of the most useful and effective language to evaluate mathematical expressions.

When thinking of small projects, sometimes the language used may not matter much, but in certain circumstances where the project demands a more specific way of solving the problem, taking some time to think and choose which the right language to use is may be the difference between a complex and a simple and effective implementation.

Using the right language for a certain problem may result in money saved in the development process. This is one of the many reasons we must be careful before choosing a language just because it has more popularity in the media, this may not always be a reliable source or is not adequate to the specific problem we may be trying to solve at the time.

Comments on "Dick Gabriel on LISP"

LISP was one of the first programming languages ever to be created, it started with the idea to have a different approach to what programming languages should be, and how values should be entered as parameters into certain functions.

LISP receives a number of arguments which will eventually be used as parameters in other functions, this makes LISP a very efficient programming language, because the functions and the functionalities between then can be related, in other words, some functions become the data of the parameter for other functions, which results in a high performance and a better coding style.

The main advantage of LISP is that is language that can be evaluated by itself. Recursion is one of the strongest characteristics of LISP, which makes it able to evaluate infinitely its own functions by itself.

Although LISP is a great programming language, it hasn't received the credit it should and it’s not very commonly used in the industry, this is mainly because of its complexity, and because a lot of people find LISP a programming language very difficult to understand, some people say you have to be crazy to code in LISP.

Although LISP is not very commonly used and not a lot of people like it, this doesn't mean it hasn't been a transcendent language in the industry. Many other programming languages have evolved from LISP (LISP is one of the oldest programming languages that exist), like Java among others. A very important contribution the LISP programming language has left as a legacy is the Java Garbage Collector, which has a very important role in the computer and coding industry. So it’s not such a bad ending for LISP.

LISP is a very powerful tool as a programming language and its usage should be encouraged, even though it might not be a very easy language to use and learn, it certainly has a lot to offer and will help people improve their coding abilities.