Language as the Ultimate Weapon

After reading the article written by Jem Berkes who emphasizes the importance and influence of the language in society's lives, we can answer an interesting question that will allow us to understand better the reading of 1984 and how it is helpful for the course. The question we are about to answer is the following: Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course?

Since the beginning of the times, language has been an important tool used by humans to communicate, creating different ways to transmit ideas, etc. this has allowed them to evolve. Creating a language is not as easy as it may look like. A language has a structure, symbols, syntax, semantics, and some other things which are proper from a language and people who understand them can understand that language. This happens too with programming languages, each programming language has its own symbols, structure, and syntax which allow people to understand it. 

But what happens when there are many languages with different symbols, syntax, and structure? Here is when it is desirable to create some standards for programming languages. These standards will allow people to understand the code and be able to solve the problem with the language they use the most. 

But, why do they say that a language is the ultimate weapon? It is the ultimate weapon for humanity because, with the correct usage of a language, many problems can be solved, in politics, with language a conflict between countries can be stopped. Let's take a look at the novel 1984 if we remember the government had control of the language and communications, but we can see the importance of a language in a society if the government had no control of it people will live in a different and better way. 

That's why many people fight for the language freedom, cause people can fight for their rights, for injustice, and many other things with it, that's why language is the ultimate weapon.

References: 

- Berkes Jem (2000). Language as the ‘Ultimate Weapon’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available on: http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/s201813/tc2006/language_ultimate_weapon.html

- Orwell George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available on: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Pair Programming

This blog entry will discuss this week's reading, a topic which I consider an interesting practice for our major, Pair Programming. We should start by defining what is Pair Programming, this is a practice in which two programmers work side-by-side at one computer, collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code or test. This practice helps to improve productivity and the quality of software products.  It also helps programmers to create confidence in their solutions. 

Many programmers refuse to start practicing pair programming, but in many cases, it is very used, a clear example is Extreme Programming. In Extreme Programming (an emerging software development methodology) all the code is written in pairs. For many methodologies, it is required gathering, resource allocation, and design practices. When there is no formal design or planned architecture in a project, the pair determines which code needs to be added or modified. 

It is important for Pair Programming to use collective code ownership whereby any programming pairs can modify or add to any code in the code base, no matter who the original programmer is. In Extreme Programming, the success has made through the use of pair programming by all programmers, also the prototypes are done with a partner. Two programmers working together are more than twice as fast and think of more than twice as many solutions to a problem as two working alone. 

I think that as a programmer you should learn to program in a single or in pairs, they are both important but it is more important to learn to pair programming because a pair works and shares ideas together for software development. The transition to pair programming might be a little rude, but you should start by understanding the benefits of intercommunication, then you must share the work. Finally, pair programmers must accept the ownership of their work. It might be difficult, but there will be awesome results at the end. 

References: 

Williams, L., & Kessler, R. (2000, May). All I Really Need to Know about Pair Programming I Learned In Kindergarten. Retrieved from http://34.212.143.74/s201911/tc2006/pair_programming_kindergarten.pdf

The Secret History of Women in Coding

After reading the article "The Secret History of Women in Coding",  I found many interesting things that I would like to discuss through this blog entry. It is well known that most of the times engineerings are dominated by men and many people have the wrong idea that men are the only one who is good at engineerings, especially in computer engineerings. Of course, this idea is totally wrong, many of the technologies innovations were created by women. 

In this article, the story of Mary Allen Wilkes is explained, in the beginning, she had no idea that she wanted to be a programmer, she went to MIT where she was hired in a programmer job. Even though she was not an expert in the area, she checked her code lines whenever there was a mistake to deduce it, checking every line in her head analyzing how the machine will execute it. Not many persons have the ability to check the code, analyze it and rewrite again completely, but she did. 

As I have said, women have been an important part of computer science, as a clear example, during World War II, women operated some of the first computational machines used for code breaking. 

There have been many cases of discrimination for women in this sector, many women that are part of very important teams inside big tech companies suffer from this, sometimes they are ignored or men repeat their ideas as if they were of them. I consider that it doesn't matter what gender you are, what sexual orientation you have, what race you are if you have disabilities or not, I consider that every person is good at something, maybe not everybody is good at programming but I do consider that we are all good at something and we are all valuable. I am really surprised that nowadays there are many women interested in computer engineerings, I am sure that they can change the world. 

- References: 

Thompson, C. (2019, February 13). The Secret History of Women in Coding. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html