I agree that it would be incredibly useful if all linguists could write
their own programs, as that would take a lot of pressure off their
computer literate colleagues and would make them feel less dependent on
other people. But there is a substantial difference between expecting
people to read and write, or to find their way in a library on the one
hand, and expecting them to be proficient programmers on the other.
During my time as a student in Computational Linguistics there were two
groups of people: those who could program fairly well and those who
didn't really like it and concentrated on theoretical aspects or
learned how to use other people's software. And we all had to learn
Pascal and Prolog/Lisp during the first two years of our course. You
can't really expect your `ordinary' linguist to acquire computing
skills of that level in their spare time.
I do realise that I would like to talk to all kinds of people all over
the world without the need of an interpreter, but I don't have the time
to learn dozens of languages. Does that mean that I should stay at
home or only talk to people who speak the languages I know? If we want
to encourage more people working in linguistics to take up corpus
linguistics (and do we not want to do this?), does that mean that they
not only have to get used to a new paradigm in their work but also have
to learn how to program at the same time? And, even amongst those
corpus linguists who can program: do you really want to waste a lot of
time writing programs when all you really want to do is look at corpus
data?
Oliver
-- //\\ computer officer | corpus research | department of english | school of - //\\ humanities | university of birmingham | edgbaston | birmingham b15 2tt - \\// united kingdom | phone +44-(0)121-414-6206 | fax +44-(0)121-414-5668/\ - \\// mobile 07050 104504 | http://www-clg.bham.ac.uk | o.mason@bham.ac.uk\/ -