http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/programming
Dr. Philip Resnik
General description
Course accounts Useful resources Class information
Professor:
Philip Resnik,
resnik@umiacs.umd.edu
Office hours: Marie Mount Hall 1401C, day/time TBA
Assistant:
Noah Smith, nasmith@umiacs.umd.edu
Office hours: TBA
Textbooks:
Philosophical statement. I believe that the role of
an instructor in a computer programming course is primarily to help
students teach themselves. Programming skill cannot be taught, it
must be acquired, and the only way to acquire it is to do a great deal
of programming. Students should expect to get out of the course what
they put into it - nobody ever became decent at programming without
spending a lot of time sitting in front of the computer making
frustrating mistakes. On the other hand, few people other
than programmers have ever experienced the sense of triumph that comes
with having succeeded at getting the computer to do what you wanted it
to! I'd strongly recommend you take a look at Peter Norvig's comments on
learning to program for some thoughts on this from a veteran.
Practical statement. A course of this kind, by
itself, will almost certainly not provide students enough of a resume
item to convince prospective employers that they have adequate
programming skills for a position that requires real programming. (See
the CORPORA mailing list, August 1998, for an interesting discussion.)
And Common LISP is not a programming language for which programmers
are highly in demand in today's job market. However, this course will
provide a solid foundation for students to build on: Common LISP is a
great first language to learn, and students will come out equipped to
do programming in service of their own research, to transfer their
skills to new programming languages, and to apply their knowledge to
coursework and research projects in computational linguistics. I've
had students go on from this to take programming courses in the
computer science department and they say it was great preparation; I
also recently received a nice e-mail
message from a former linguistics student who is applying what he
learned in the course on a day to day basisl.
Statement about statements. :-) As always, I expect
to be educated by the process of teaching and by my students as the
semester progresses!
Course Description
General statement. This course is a one-semester
introduction to computer programming, intended for linguists and other
non-computer-scientists who wish to acquire skills and fundamental
programming concepts. It is not intended for
students who already have significant programming experience and wish
to get introduced to another language or two. The majority of the
course will teach Common LISP, with the last section of the course
covering Perl. Students who take this course and like it are
encouraged to take Linguistics 645, Introduction to Computational
Linguistics, where they will have the opportunity to further apply
their programming expertise. Course Requirements and Grading
Philip Resnik Phone: (301) 405-6760
Department of Linguistics Fax: (301) 405-7104
1401 Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
By far the best way to reach me is by e-mail to resnik@umiacs.umd.edu.