RE: Corpora: Corpus Linguistics User Needs

Amy Winarske (amy@winarske.com)
Fri, 31 Jul 1998 17:56:08 -0700

The industrial viewpoint on Philip Resnik's questions.....

As an "industrial" software engineer who once worked in Computational
Linguistics, I say learn PERL and C, in that order.

* PERL because it's useful, easy to learn, very powerful, and lots of
companies are using it for a wide variety of tasks. You will be employed if
you know PERL.

* C requires a basic understanding of programming, there's lots of C code
out there, and it runs almost everywhere. Most software engineers know C
and will be much more comfortable hiring somebody whose skill set they
understand. If you know C, you should be able to pick up most other
programming languages.

* C++ and Microsoft knowledge are in hot demand everywhere.

* Java is not catching on because the promise of portable code has not been
fulfilled. The reality of the situation is the various Java VMs are not
compatible and programming in Java provides no porting advantages. Many
companies are opting out for C++ instead because it is object oriented and
faster than Java.

* Lisp is almost nonexistent and Prolog even scarcer. I wouldn't waste a
minute on either at this point.

Amy Winarske
Software Engineer
Silicon Valley
amy@winarske.com