Re: Does natural language skill translate to programming skill?

On Mar 11, 10:38 am, Joachim Pense <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am 11 Mar 2007 05:29:59 -0700 schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

On Mar 11, 4:40 am, Helmut Weber <nbhymsjxd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Brian,

[...]

Most of the study of linguistics, specially theoretical
linguistics, involved programming, especially long
forgotten Prolog and Lisp.

Preposterous nonsense. Prolog is about 35 years old, and
even Lisp is only about 50 years old; linguistics is *much*
older than either.

[...]

Don't let me be misunderstood.
I was talking about my studies
and was trying to point out that
since there is computational linguistics
it is an important tool of research.

And just a tool.

Some of my professors had never touched
a computer keyboard, which didn't make their
work any less important or less brilliant.

However, IMHO, today programming skills
are more important and I wonder,
whether a study of linguistics can
be complete without it.

Why don't you survey the last 50 years or so (Brian's date) of the
journal *Language*, and tell us how many computational linguistics
articles you find there?

The computer science of that time certainly had a lot, because then
there was a lot of funding for computer translation projects.

And in fact they knew nothing about linguistics.

Even Chomsky, whose background was in formal logic, managed to pick a
feud with the main MIT AI guru, Vic Yngve, and Chicago snapped him up
with a professorship in no fewer than four departments (all of which
except linguistics no longer exist). In 1975 he was still teaching
COMIT II, and worked for some 40 years on "Linguistics as a Human
Science," which was rather underwhelming when it was finally published.

.

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