Entradas

Ultimate weapon

Ok, here comes I believe the greatest challenge of the blogs of this semester... find a way to relate music, 1984 and programming languages. (This is what I get for using mostly music topics related to lectures/podcasts). The term Newspeak language will be my anchor in order to make these relationships. How? Easy, newspeak language purpose (out of mind control making other thinking ways impossible -teehee-) was to be a bridge between ideas of Ingsoc, let's make a direct relationship between that and experimental music genres. We have always, since the dawn of time, categorized stuff, this applied to music as well, we have been thought that the rock band structure is guitar, vocals, drums and bass, but why? because we always want to set a standard, but what happens when you use a violin arch to play a guitar solo and get a unique constant sound... you get Led Zeppelin's Rock n' Roll's solo, this same idea happens in programming languages, thanks to this course I believ...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

Simone Simons

Yet another music reference, let's face it... this is my way of thinking. Women have had a hard time in all aspects throughout history, and coding is not an exception... even though at the very beginning they found within programming a specific niche for them to be involved, rapidly it was devoured by stereotypes and corruption of that closed minded society from before the 90s. Still, they found ways to show how they had their expertise increased greatly for coding, this way happened with some women in music industry, even though in the first half of the 20th century we already had big artists like Aretha Franklin for example, it was still seen sometimes as girls could only sing/dance or just be moms  (italics as I'm not refering to being a mother, I'm referring as the society's role of a mom that must stay in house) this made us have great surprises with those hidden talents people have. Talent by no means is a gender specific matter, even though we have many diffe...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

Vintage heirlooms

Lisp has taught us many important things and change how programming is throughout the years. It taught us how we can use lists to process data and even its usage as data structures. Such is that nowadays this is our way of work, most of us (besides thinking in object oriented) we think in lists when processing information, and how each of its items relate to each other or even to other lists. And here comes my musical reference... There are many bands that can be related to Lisp, for example how Black Sabbath practically invented how Metal should sound like, how the first Californian Rock bands from the 90s implemented power chords as a main guitar technique, how Meat Loaf normalized the opera-like voice in metal, and so on. Like these examples I can list n  of them of how they influenced actual music genres. In this way, Lisp made us heirs of its functionality and some of us didn't even knew it.
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

2 drums 2 codes

Sorry, again a music similitude I found... Once, around 4 years ago I found a video in youtube of two drummers who were making a cover of Toxicity by System of a Down. The coordination, timing, tuning they both had was incredible, the song just sounded in tune and strong, like with a natural reverb (they were in an open space without any walls, so forget about any scenery reverb). This jumped right into my mind as I was touching the subject of pair programming, as you can't blame one drummer for being out of time whether he was rushing or dragging, they were both following a song so it was a team's effort... saying this, you can't blame an observer or driver as they're both, at that moment, just one entity responsible for making a functioning code. By attempting this collaborative technique you can attack efficiencies and less mistakes as something may pass by someone's thinking process, the other half of the team may find that mistake before having to go and ...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

Clojure and jazz

I would like to quote some similitudes I found between Clojure and Jazz. I know... it's not the most accurate relation as we're talking about programming languages and music (I'm not getting tired of trying to find related stuff between both areas). But, as a matter of fact, the idea of Clojure not being a mainstream  language, such as Java or C, it's much more of a specific people's delight... just like jazz. Jazz is known (in many of its subgenres) for being overwhelmingly complicated such as jazz bands, so many variations in rhythm and melodics, while having variants such as acid jazz with smooth, cozy and brilliant tunes. Clojure may be a mixture between these two subgenres, having the complexity of classic jazz bands while executing smooth and highly efficient functions. Imagine making a super complicated clojure program that displays a responsive website with parallax effects in a couple lines (maybe around 100), that'd be relatable to composing a s...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

Lisp the mad genius

As you know, I like to use analogies in my posts, mostly music, and this time will be no exception. I think, from the podcast, I have one big learning: "never underestimate what something can do like opening your eyes". Why do I say this? Because I never imagined Lisp was used in AI (I mean, I didn't even know that Lisp was a thing to be honest)... that being said, I felt mirrored with some details, like something out of your professional area can actually help you with that specific area. ...here comes my music analogy... FOR EXAMPLE! Music... music has helped me lots since I was in middle school. I've always like math and music, and as they're brothers from a different father it's been quite a win-win situation. Now what does this have to do with coding? A lot, coding is all about structure (usually), rhythm, rules, discipline, just like music. Now, with functional languages this just goes over the top, I'm struggling with Clojure's structure a...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

More music... why not

And again I shall compare the article with music. The word this entry will revolve around is  abstraction . Love/hate relationship whether it's coding or composing. The author explains many things, but what I consider beautiful is how he tells us how big the reward is after struggling with abstraction of functional languages... maybe not in these words but I shall rephrase it with my own salt & pepper. Alright,  almost  every tutorial, blog or stackoverflow post I've read of Clojure says that the best way to learn it is by coding, thing I just realized after the first problems homework and here comes my analogy... how do you master any musical instrument? By playing it! In this course I shall make Clojure my own guitar. First you don't realize how powerful a guitar can be, you may think you'll become a rockstar by just playing punk songs from Californian bands but even them had to practice and study. Maybe some people are born with the talent but also to s...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más