Incipit Historia
As a child I loved to read, both fiction and non-fiction. My family had a set of encyclopedias, and I often turned to them to learn more about a particular subject, reading through an article, then finding related articles under the “See also:” section at the end, looking up a related article, and so on. I can spend hours in a library or bookstore.
When I first learned about the Internet and the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, I imagined them as a vast library. When I first logged on, I found it thrilling to visit web pages in other countries and realize that the content I was seeing was hosted on a computer far away, yet arrived on my screen almost instantly–or about as instantly as a 14.4 Kbps modem could manage. At that time there wasn’t much content, even compared with my local library. This was before Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud, and so on.
As interested as I was in computers and the Internet, I ended up pursuing a different interest in college: language. At least, at that time the two subjects seemed to me to be quite separate. Since my graduation I have gradually come to notice how closely linguistics and computer science have been intertwined since at least the 1950s, and how they are becoming ever more intertwined in the present, as both linguists and computer scientists devote much research effort to the problem of natural language understanding.
I have used open source software for almost 20 years without giving anything back. I have also learned much (or so I think!) about language and computer programming in my own personal quest to satisfy my curiosity about such subjects, and hopefully to make a living as well. But a lake without an outlet becomes a dead sea. My intention with this web log is to share what I’ve learned, or what I think, about certain subjects, particularly related to linguistics and computer programming. In some areas I may have a pretty solid grasp of the subject, but in many areas I will be posting as I learn.
Just to whet your appetite (or alternatively, to warn you off), here are a few topics I’m currently interested in, ordered more or less by my grasp of them: etymology, onomastics, functional programming, logic programming, ontology, concurrent programming, graph databases and graph processors, and machine learning.