Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 268.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2003 06:29:45 +0100
From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@ischool.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: 17.265 dance steps to coding
Here's one example of Francois's theory. I learnt Fortran from having to
document other peoples' code for an archaeological analysis suite (1974); I
learnt Z-80 assembly language mostly from a manual and Knuth because there
was not even an operating system available when I first began to use
microcomputers to do concordancing of Old French (1977); and I taught
myself Snobol and Pascal (1978), the latter using the feedback from the
truly wonderful University of Minnesota (mainframe) and Turbo Pascal
(microcomputer) compilers. Since then I've dealt with many database
languages, UNIX procedural languages, HTML, XML, PHP, and now I'm trying to
learn Java. I am a true believer (some would say a bigot) that in our
generation of computing humanists, those who are dependent on keeping the
hood shut will have to take what vendors shove at them: we aren't yet in
the place where all our problems have been so "black-boxed" that we can use
standard off-the-shelf software for everything. Besides, my students have
to figure out how to preserve the digital heritage, and you can't do that
without knowing how it's built.
Pat Galloway
School of Information
University of Texas-Austin
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