Python for Linguists

Abstract

Teaching programming skills is a hard task. It is even harder if one targets an audience with no or little mathematical background. Although there are books on programming that target such groups, they often fail to raise or maintain interest due to artificial examples that lack reference to the professional issues that the audience typically face. This book fills the gap by addressing linguistics, a profession and academic subject for which basic knowledge of script programming is becoming more and more important. The book Python for Linguists by Michael Hammond is an introductory Python course targeted at linguists with no prior programming background. It succeeds previous books for Perl (Hammond 2008) and Java (Hammond 2002) by the same author, and reflects the current de facto prevalence of Python when it comes to adoption and available packages for natural language processing. We feel it necessary to clarify that the book aims at (general) linguists in the broad sense rather than computational linguists. Its aim is to teach linguists the fundamental concepts of programming using typical examples from linguistics. The book should not be mistaken as a course for learning basic algorithms in computational linguistics. We acknowledge that the author nowhere makes such a claim; however, given the thematic proximity to computational linguistics, one should have the right expectation before working with the book. Chapters 1–5 lay the foundations of the Python programming language, introducing the most important language constructs but deferring object oriented programming to a later part of the book. The focus in Chapters 1 and 2 covers the basic data types (numbers, strings, dictionaries), with a particular emphasis on simple string operations, and introduces some more advanced concepts such as mutability. Chapters 3–5 introduce control structures, input–output operations, and modules. The book goes at great length to visualize the program flow and the state of different variables for different steps in a program execution, which is certainly very helpful for learners with no prior programming experience. The book also guides the learner to understand certain error types that frequently occur in computer programming (but might be unintuitive for beginners). For example, when discussing function calls, much care is devoted to pointing out the unintended consequences stemming from mutability and side effects.