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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Today's blog I'm going to talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy written by Douglas Adams published in 1979. I have never read sci-fi books this was my first book on the topic followed by Ready Player One, and I think I have found one of my favourites topics, but this specific one is very confused to read, sometimes I get lost and I had to go back and read again to catch up. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy talks about a journey through space. Arthur Det and Ford Prefect escape from Earth because it's going to be destroyed, they escape in one of the Vogon's ships later they are caught by the captain Zaphod, also known as the president of the universe. Basically, they saved them. I forgot to mention that meanwhile, they were travelling in the Vogon's ship Arthur was freaked out about what just happened, so Ford gave him a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which was a kinda Wikipedia for space, it contained everything you must know about ...

Technical Overview of the CLR

This time I'm going to talk about an article named Technical Overview of the Common Language Runtime" the author of this article is Erik Meijer and Kim Miller, explained how some language researchers moved to JVM as a type of delivery vehicle for their language. As we have seen in past classes is a really good target for Java programming, but also we have seen that JVM is not for all programming languages. Also Erik and Kim introduce us to Microsoft .NET Common Language Infrastructure, designed to be a multilanguage platform. As expected the authors are employees of Microsoft or members as far as we know the have Microsoft emails. They will try to talk only good things about their product and also they will try to compare it with their competence. They talk to us about the pros of CLI I never saw the bad things that may occur while using CLI. I would love to see a comparison outside Microsoft. I really like comparisons in Youtube and they talk with the truth and nothing but ...

Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

Once again the author of this article was our professor Ariel Ortiz, in his article "Building Server-Side Web Language Processors", in first hand it tries to explain if it's possible to build a language processor in a web environment, and the huge importance of adapting our work to a web interface and some other important areas to be considered when you're trying to do this, mainly because it can get tricky. As I stated above it can get very tricky, so developing a language processor for the web has a lot of challenges involved that you are not aware of. One example that it's declared in the article it's the handling of the HTTP, adaptability, security, etc. However, there are many tools and techniques to prevent this huge issue.  The strategies settled for our professor are the next ones: * Program your own server * Build everything over web technology already used and known * Use the Common Gateway Interface These mentioned just a few moments ago h...

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper aka the mother of Cobol, was an amazing woman, who helped the US Navy, helped to pressure the industry to make computers and computing more accessible, helped to bring research and career interests to women. I really like when I find out the achievements of women, especially in my field, it gives me chills all over me. She studied in one of the most prestige schools in US, Yale, to gain her master's degree and then a doctorate in maths and mathematical physics. Just after the US entered second world war Hopper jump into the team being assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation project at Harvard. As you can see, Hopper was a super capable person. Another of her contributions to the computer world was that she was one of the first persons to bring a name for "bugs" being a bug. I did not even know that we call bugs because there was an actual bug in the machine. But not only she contributed to all of these I just mentioned, but she also was one of the firs...

Internals of GCC

In episode 61 of Software Engineering Radio the guest was Dr. Morgan Deters, who was a senior research scientist at the Courant Institute of New York University, titled "Internals of GCC". The whole podcast talks about how GCC works internally, which is a project of GNU. Dr. Morgan lists all the steps of a GNU Compiler Collection, from programming languages to processor binary code generation.  I have only heard the concept of GCC only when I have compiled programs of c and c++, but I never thought that it could compile more programming languages, I did not know what it does. Dr. Morgan explains three important parts: Front-End, Middle-End (which actually it's its proper name) and Back-End. At first, I was a little confused because I have never heard the term Middle-End, but later he will explain at detail.  Front-End was described as a type of black-box that converts the input- into a tree who will help later in the next phases. The Middle-End takes the output of ...

The hundred-year language

It's hard to believe a life without java, at least for me. Java was the second programming language I learned to program, immediately I fell in love with it. And to think in the future it may disappear it make me feel blue. I know that languages evolve and that some have a dead-end like Cobol. But maybe java won't disappear, maybe the author was making a wrong assumption, maybe java it's the beginning of a new era of programming languages. One thing I have clear is that the programming languages are going to be much better hundred-years from now. And the saddest thing is that no one of us reading this is going to be alive to check them. If Moore's law is still relative. The programming languages we have now won't be working, they CPUs will be 70quintilion-ish faster than ours. They will be needing programming languages that can communicate with that CPU power. One statement that the author gives us is "If you have the opportunity to program in one of those ...

Introducing Myself

Hello everyone: My name is Mauricio Maximiliano Pérez Pérez and like most of you, I'm doing my major in Computer Sciences currently in 8th semester out of 9th. Choosing my major was pretty easy for me, I can recall being little kid and falling in love with technology, playing video games with my brothers and having my computer lessons when I was in elementary school.  I fell in love with music when I was about 6 years old when my parents enrolled me in a drum course, but I dropped it later on. When I was in the second semester of my major, I started with Youtube guitar lessons and I have fallen in love since, besides music my other hobby is tennis. I've played tennis for almost 5 years now, these two hobbies fill in me with happiness. I love watching series, my recently favorite ones are: -Friends -The office -TWD (The Walking Dead) -Game of Thrones -Breaking Bad