Why take LAC: Language and The Computer?

• Jobs: being able to program allows you to do many more things
  Concretely, python-enabled graduates from my class work with Google, with Apple, with ByteDance, in start ups, as paid grad students in European Union projects, …
• Fun: being able to program allows you to do many more things
  You can make weird lists (four word phrases with first letter PING)
  Pretty Intelligent Network Guru; Pink Indigo Neo Grass, …
• Wisdom: once you see how programming works you can judge what is trivial/easy/hard/impossible, even if you don't actually program it yourself.
• Fun: You can quickly make simple games (multilingual hang-man)
• Efficiency: You can save a lot of time!
  Psycho-linguistic colleagues spent all weekend cutting and pasting data (and made an error somewhere) a five-minute python script did it correctly in one go
• Fun: You can quickly play with questions like: are there different sounds (or a different distribution of letters) in reptile names than mammal names?

Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art. You can create projects that other people can play with, and you can talk to them indirectly. No other art form is quite this interactive. Movies flow to the audience in one direction. Paintings do not move. Code goes both ways. Zed A. Shaw Learn Python the Hard Way

Why Python?

• 5 reasons why Python is powerful enough for Google
• It's wonderful (XKCD)

LAC: Language and the Computer Francis Bond.