1)
It would be nice, if people could share knowledge about available tools for
linguistic tasks (incl. quality, universality, easy-to-use...). Several
people pointed that out and pointed to available resources (if the number
of tools does not require a tool to select a tool).
2)
And now something completely different: the industry seems to prefer people
who have programming skills; some (many?) companies seem to prefer a good
programmer with little linguistic knowledge over a good linguist with
little or no programming skills (or am I to pride and prejudice? but just
reading adds tells me this). For this reason, we encourage our students to
be able to handle vi, (..)awk, grep, C/++, html, etc. - not because we
think linguists have to program their own applications but it increases the
students' chances to get a well-payed job. (And it is surely true, that
knowing e.g. awk enables you to do many things without a programmer - as
long as the script/program really does what it was intended to do).
But I still believe that a good linguist together with (parts of) a good
programmer (both cooperative) are (a) better than two average linguists
that can do average programming and (b) are easier to find than a good
linguist that is a good programmer (not because good linguists are by
nature bad programmers or vice versa - but being good in one area leaves
hardly any time and mental power to be good in another area).
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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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/____________________) /______( )____________________________\
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Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate.