Chapter 5: Episode 3: Revenge of the Nerds

You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the Nerds, not join them! Bring balance to the knowledge, not leave it in darkness! You were my brother *Insert Nerd name here*! I loved you!


World acclaimed article; The Revenge of the Nerds

I felt I had a déjà vu reading this article, somewhat related to the article written by Paul Graham “Beating the Averages”, it almost seems they were written by the same author… Anyways, this article seems like a continuation of that said post. And Lisp is described (again) as an underrated tool, powerful enough to wipe the competition, just as ITA’s application, where the market was being dominated by Travelocity and Expedia and later was overturned to ITA’s favor, thanks to the macros in their Lisp code.

One of the topics I would like to address are the pointy-haired people, with the great qualities of knowing absolutely nothing of technology and having strong opinions about it. I have met a lot of people like that through my university life. While I don’t consider myself very tech-savvy, at least I know what I’m talking about (when I talk about stuff, or well, at least I try). Whenever I’m involved in a topic I’m not that familiarized, at least I give my ideas as opinions, not as facts (as many other people do). I think this may be an important problem, the close-minded people are leading (for the time being) many businesses and we need to start changing that. Graham achieved great things by exploring different alternatives, not by doing what everyone is doing. This pointy-haired people try shielding themselves from the blame they could get by justifying his decisions with “industry standards” or “most used language”. This attitude is avoiding leadership and innovation, keys in making a company valuable.


I think that with this course we will be more open minded to the way we code, to the way we think and make our decisions. Lisp (from what I have read) is an incredible tool we should get familiar with, improving the way we code and the way we approach different coding problems. 

 References:
Graham Paul (2002). Revenge of the nerds. Available on http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 7: Clojure Podcast with our beloved friend, Hickey, Rich Hickey

Image
So… Clojure by Rich Hickey is the podcast we are covering up in today’s blog. We have seen and read about the advantages of Clojure, however, there was an interesting point that was said during the first part of the podcast (13:21) that struck me; “At the core, for instance, Clojure, is much much simpler than Java… There are two different notions of simplicity, you could say that LISP is simple because it has a very simple syntax, only consisting of a couple of abstractions… but Java is simpler because I am guided more”. This argument made me realize which of both, Java or Clojure is more “simple”. Of course, Java is more guided through the coding process, however, it is hard to comprehend what happens in each line of the code. For experienced Java developers, they may see it as something trivial, but for novice programmers, some coding standards or abstractions are put in their codes because they are told to do so. Many don’t go beyond the understanding of the logic behind ...
Read more

Chapter 8: More robust, more compact, and more easily parallelizable; For an unlimited time offer, we present you: Functional Programming

Image
This blog is about how functional programming has a lot of advantages over traditional programming, such as concurrent and parallel programming. One of the first things that pops out when using Lisp is its syntax; simple yet flexible nested lists. This data structure usage is one of the principal advantages of functional programming; it allows to generate and execute other Lisp code. Now we have Clojure, which is a recent Lisp dialect that shines thanks to various features, one of which being their high optimized data structures, that offers extensive support for concurrency. A key concept in functional programming are abstractions, that expresses an algorithm in terms of concepts instead of operations. These functional languages can be grouped together in a few groups, like “Clojure and the Lisp Family” and ML family, where Standard ML, OCaml and F# are included. The difference between this two groups are that ML is statically typed (Haven’t heard of F# yet, it feels li...
Read more

Chapter 10: Riding the… bear?

Image
Reverse engineering was the main topic of the video (or at least, the one I found most interesting). How the company was available to replicate the ROM BIOS through this concept is something fascinating, whatever was meant to be hidden and secret, was forever known and open to the public after the reverse engineering process. This process involved two different types of employees, the ones that know how the system works, and the so called “virgins”, which knowledge of the ROM BIOS was inexistent. The journey to get to a completed product no one knew how it worked (at least the engineers in charge of building the chip) is the thing I liked the most. And that’s how Compaq made a portable computer, compatible with IBM. This was the start of the dozens of rivals IBM started acquiring thanks to the easiness to build a clone. The thing in common every clone-builder had, was its operating system, acquired thanks to Microsoft. Finally, this way the balance worked out for Microsoft...
Read more