Ready Player One

For this final entry, we are going to talk about Ernest Cline book "Ready Player One", which gave us a pretty interesting adventure, that personally I liked it, so the purpose of this entry is making a reflexion, taking as a starting point, the next two paragraphs:

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he'd left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible "It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity", he wrote. "A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect". (p. 120)

(Halliday speaking) "I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where un can find true happiness. Because reality is real" (p.364)

First of all, I'm gonna begin with the if I agree with the quotations before? And the answer is yes, because as their perspectives, they are right, reality is hard so we find ways to escape from it, but at the same time, as everything, if we escape too much it can be harmful and we can lost the sense of reality, so there should be balance between them. About the virtues in OASIS I think, the are many like loyalty, like Daito y Shoto, they were not brothers but they acted like that, also perseverance to find the keys and solving the puzzles, so there are virtues I found in the book.
Our value system it could be altered if we spent most of the time in an OASIS like system, because there are histories, were you loose the sense of time and reality, our costumes will be altered and the lost, because if we made a comparison with our current use of IT technologies like computers, game consoles, smart phones, and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc) with the OASIS game at the book, the is no big difference, games had change their role, now all is virtual and practically the new generation born with technology, so it is no gap between the reality we live and the book. We live with IT technologies in our daily life.
I think all this books like Ready Player One, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, etc, for so creepy that it sounds, have a little bit of truth, I mean it's like predicting future, but the worst part is that most of the time we did not notice about it, obviously it is not the 100% of what happen in the real world, but we are getting closer.
So, I think it is possible, technological having a similar OASIS nowadays, because now games have evolved to the point we can connect with people from the other part of the world and so on, the tools now are pretty closer for an OASIS game, also reminded me to the Spy Kids 3, where was kind of game of the book, but less interesting. And the fact that video games are pretty addictive isn't it?

References
"Ready Player One", by Ernest Cline

An Introduction to Metaprogramming

Hi everyone! On this entry we are going to talk about metaprogramming written by Ariel Ortiz. First of all, we need to know that a metraprogram is a program that generates other programs or program parts, which is helpful when we want to generate source code, but before we can do this, we need to know the adequate tools to make that magic happen!
The article show us an hypothetical situation, were metaprogramming is the solution, so if we want to write an extense source code, without doing manually or using loops, the only thing we can do is write a program that creates it, so the example they show us, is print a sentence too many times. And that is an easier way, also we can do it with images. Another thing, we can do is generating source code and execute it on the spot, only calling eval, which is a function some languages have, allowing to translate and execute an piece of source code contained. This feature is mostly available on interpreted languages as Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Python and Javascript. But eval, can have it's disadvantages, like can be insecure, that's why it exist an other alternatives as quines, quines are defined as a program that generates a copy of its own source text as it's complete output. Another advantage of metaprogramming is the possibility of modifying programs during Runtime.
So, after reading this article I think or I agree that metaprogramming is not only for programming languages gurus, the important here is knowing the tools of each programming language as eval. And metaprogramming have the advantage that for larger programs, we can write a program to do the tedious work, but I think the hardest part is knowing how to write a program that write programs, so it's important knowing the techniques.

For more information visit An Introduction to Metaprogramming by Ariel Ortiz.