1)
Writing a program is one thing. Testing and proving its correctness is
another thing. Even for simple statistical problems I prefer to use
standard statistical packages because I expect their algorithms to be
better tested than my own code (but I compare always their results with
examples from text books; if both disagree, I compute the problem on the
example data by hand and found more often bugs in the textbooks than in the
programs). Being an experiecend programmer having written many thousands
lines of code, I prefer to use standard software.
2)
I don't have to be a car mechanic to drive a car. Why do I have to be a
programmer to use a corpora? --- But I have to know as a driver what petrol
my car takes, how good the breaks are, etc. As a user of a program, I
cannot simple trust the program but have to be aware of its bugs or
problems. I think it is a good policy to test a function by hand on a small
data set and do cross-checks and plausibility tests on large data sets.
3)
Why re-invent the wheel?
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________| Henning Reetz |________
\ | Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft | /
\ | Universitaet Konstanz | /
\ | Fach D186, D-78457 Konstanz | /
\ | Phone:(49)7531-882928, Fax:883095 | /
/ | | \
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/ ( ) Oooo. \
/____________________) /______( )____________________________\
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Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate.