teaching perl programming to linguistics BA students

[dan]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students
who have no knowledge of programming. Any suggestions about
textbooks, relevant exercises/projects, or websites?

thanks in advance!

 

[axel]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students
who have no knowledge of programming. Any suggestions about
textbooks, relevant exercises/projects, or websites?

Are you sure that you should be teaching Perl in that sense?

A serious question as some (many) years ago I did do some work
using Terry Winograd: Language as a Cognitive Process and
wrote some stuff based upon it.

I think it was mosly in Prolog however.

But I would be very interested in what you wish to teach - please give
us further details as it sounds fascinating.

Axel

 

[Anno Siegel]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students
who have no knowledge of programming. Any suggestions about
textbooks, relevant exercises/projects, or websites?

There's Andrew L. Johnson, _Elements of Programming with Perl_, Manning.
I don't know the book or the author.

Anno

 

[Tad McClellan]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students

That would be cool, given the linguistics background of
Perl's creator (Larry Wall).

See "Natural Language Principles in Perl":

http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html


After covering "list vs scalar context" in Perl training classes,
when there are lots of furrowed brows, I try to ease the students
minds by pointing out that they do this "context thing" every
day already. It is not new or scary.

It's just that they are used to doing it in natural language
rather than in computer language. I give this example:

Give me a fish.

Give me several fish.

Where "fish" has 2 different meanings, the 1st in a singular noun
and the 2nd is a plural noun.

How do we tell which meaning to assign to "fish"?

By looking at what's around the word "fish" (ie. it's context).

Perl has the concept of singular (scalar) and plural (list).

Then, if I see mostly smooth brows, I rile them up again with:

I like to fish.

Where it has yet another meaning, a verb.

The natural-languageness of Perl makes is a sub-optimal language (IMO)
for teaching CS fundamentals though.

who have no knowledge of programming.

Ugh. That will be the hard part, as you will need to teach some
fundamentals of general computer science, which will not be
included most programming language tutorial materials...

 

[Tad McClellan]

There's Andrew L. Johnson, _Elements of Programming with Perl_, Manning.
I don't know the book or the author.

I know both. I did a few pre-release reviews and am mentioned
in the Acknowledgements.

It's target audience is non-programmers, and I think it does a
reasonably good job of hitting its target.

Some others to consider that I've heard about but have no
first-hand knowledge of:

"Beginning Perl" by Simon Cozens
available online at: http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/

"Perl: The Programmer's Companion" by Nigel Chapman

 

[Iain Chalmers]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students
who have no knowledge of programming. Any suggestions about
textbooks, relevant exercises/projects, or websites?

Allison Randall gave a linguistics talk at the Perl Conference in 2002.
It was as close as that conference got to a sellout session I think,
people sitting in the aisles, people standing in the corridor outside.

<google google google>

Here you go:

An Introduction to Linguistics for Perl Developers
or
"Wouldn't know a tagmeme if it bit me on the parse."

http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/sessions/randal_tagmemics.pdf

http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/movies/

Maybe that'll give you a few ideas?

big

 

[Arne Ruhnau]

I am interested in teaching Perl programming to linguistics BA students
who have no knowledge of programming. Any suggestions about
textbooks, relevant exercises/projects, or websites?

I myself learned Perl this way (actually I learned it before my course
started, but thats another story...) However, my teacher used at first "the
classic", Learning Perl. In a later course he had managed to write an own
reader with tasks specific to NLP (mostly ngram-counting, i think...). The
reader is in German, though...

Here's the link (you should ask the author for permission if you plan to
use it, i guess):

http://www.linguistics.rub.de/~halama/lehre/perl-2004/materialien/perl-tutorium.pdf

and the corresponding homepage would be

http://www.linguistics.rub.de/~halama

hth,

Arne Ruhnau