Programming Languages Patrick Burchard

One hour can be lo... short! In the podacst from Software Engineering Radio,  Richard P. Gabriel talks about some characteristics and facts of LISP. Before starting the podcast I thought this will be boring and also take a long time. But I was wrong and the time just flew by. Step by step I´m learning more about Programming Languages in general, Clojure, LISP and the history behind this. It is really interesting how important the role of LISP has been in artificial intelligence. I was always really interested in this kind of matter but I never went to deep. I could not imagine, that there are such advantages over other languages. He also spoke about the fact, that everything in LISP is a function and the mandatory nesting (which I do not always get in Clojure). Regarding this, it is very important to understand the concept of sequences (lists),because this is the core of the language One of the major goals of LISP according to Gabriel was to write code which no one knew ...

Is LISP the holy grail? The article "Beating the Averages" written by Paul Graham (2001) describes how the use of an uncommon programming language (LISP) can be used as an advantage. In the opinion of Graham LISP is the best programming language for a startup so far.  I understand the advantages of the language and the advantage to react fast against competitors. If you do different than your competitors and observe them closely you can get a head start in different areas. But in my opinion this article is quite one-sided. You often only hear about companies which succeeded. It would be interesting to know if other companies (in other working areas) also succeeded like Graham´s company. Sometimes it looks like Graham is choosing personal experience over solid data (which might be the right choice). In the end ViaWeb, Graham´s company, was bought by Yahoo. He also compares programming languages to be half religion. I do agree with this opinion because users of a spec...

What is the most important thing for people in the world? There are many answers for this question. Some would say it is love , some would say it is health and even some would say it is money ... But for many people the most important thing in the world is the freedom to express themselves. One basic foundation of this concept is communication and especially (the use of) languages . That is why approximately 6912 languages exist in the world.  The article states that in the year 2006 there even existed more than 8000 programming languages, raising by the number of one each day. The special thing is that there is a huge variety of languages, which can be used for specific tasks. For example, there are more than four different languages just to create a new web page.  Like me, people often refuse to change things they are used to and which they like. But our world is moving fast and things are changing even faster from day to day. Having this in mind, languages must...

Hi, I´m Patrick.  I´m from Stuttgart, Germany and just turned 23 years. I´m currently studying in my 3th semester in the Master ’ s degree in Business Psychology. Right now I´m an exchange student at ITESM CEM. I do really love to go running, bicycling and snowboarding. In addition, I enjoy reading mostly books about natural sciences. I´m an absolute fan of electronic music, more accurate Hardstyle. I listen a lot to this music and also go to as many festivals as I can. One other hobby is playing videogames. I do play a lot of different games, mostly online games with friends. Right now, I´m watching the new episodes of one of my favorite tv shows, which is Game of Thrones. What do I expect from the Programming Languages course at ITESM CEM? While I´m not studying Computer Science at all, I want to learn and understand different programming styles. The reasons are, that I think that computer science is getting more important every year and I want to learn something abou...