I normally listen to podcasts while I’m driving to and from work, so when we mentioned podcasts in class, I thought my routine would stay the same. However, since I haven’t left my house for a few weeks, this was the first podcast I’ve listened to while doing absolutely nothing else, which I think ended up being a good choice, even if the podcast was never too technical.
I really like how Gabriel relates programming to art, as I feel that it’s commonly (and mistakenly) said that computer science and creativity are on different ends of a spectrum. In my very short career as a programmer, I’ve seen code that I would easily consider works of art (and others, not so much).
Since the course started and I started listening to all the things Lisp could be used for, I have been wondering why it only recently started picking up steam, but Gabriel mentions a very important point: it’s not an easy language to learn. He mentions that it’s not too popular with companies, and that makes sense as it’s relatively difficult to read, which makes it inefficient when multiple people and teams are working on the same projects.
However, I do see the use of functional programming, as it facilitates a lot of things that are too complicated to implement using different paradigms. So even though I find it hard to believe that a language like this will ever become as widespread as some of the languages we see today, other variations such as Clojure, that work with the Java Virtual Machine, could be used alongside these other languages to create better results.
The only part of the podcast that I’m not sure I completely understand is when he mentions the meta-circular interpreter. I fully understand that it means that the interpreter is written in the same language that it is interpreting, but it’s not quite clear to me how the program is initially interpreted.
No comments:
Post a Comment