Programming Languages

In the article called "Language as the ’Ultimate Weapon’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four" written by Jem Berkes, the author tells us how the Newspeak vocabulary is a powerful weapon in George Orwell's novel. The reason why Newspeak is considered a weapon is because it was made with the purpose of decrease the limits of the thought and the Party makes necessary its use. Therefore, Newspeak is perfect for a totalitarian government that wants to control its population for a long time. To describe the above, it's possible to use the following cite "To expand language is to expand the ability to think," (Berkes, 2000) which means that a huge vocabulary results in a greater ability to think. Therefore, what the Party decided to do with the newspeak is to limit it every year, reducing the ability to think as well. Another thing that Berkes mentions in the article is that in the novel torture is not used as part of control for the Party regime, rather the tactics of psy...

In the article called "The Roots of Lisp" by Paul Graham, the author describes the important role that John McCarthy played in 1960 with the creation of the programming language called Lisp. In its beginnings, Lisp was quite basic, but thanks to the potential of this language, it was possible to build much more complex and at the same time powerful functions. Lisp only needs lists because the key idea was to use a single data structure, both for code and for data, although in many of the current Lisp-based languages, they use more types of structures to simplify the language and make it more flexible. On the other hand, I think that this Paul Graham's statement "It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model" is quite interesting and even successful. I think that both models mentioned by Graham are the core of modern programming languages. I would say that the C model has been the s...