My last post led to a thread on Mastodon about the merits of LLM-assisted writing in one’s second language. There were some interesting replies, some of which are unfortunately behind the đź”’, so I can’t share them here. After some consideration, I think I can do better than my last post by not letting the… Continue reading LLMs and librarianship in one’s second language
Category: language
Seeing like my students: writing in a second language
Ce billet de blogue constitue une tentative de rĂ©daction dans ma langue adoptĂ©e. Il procède d’un dĂ©sir de mieux comprendre mes Ă©tudiants, qui rĂ©digent souvent dans une langue qui n’est pas la leur. Il s’agit, plus prĂ©cisĂ©ment, de comprendre les outils qu’ils utilisent Ă cette fin, notamment les grands modèles de langage (LLM). Je sais… Continue reading Seeing like my students: writing in a second language
JavaScript for teaching and learning
It turns out that JavaScript has proven more useful for my job than Python. I certainly use it more. I assume this is an inevitable result of being a Web Librarian. JavaScript has seeped into my professional life. Part of me wishes this was different. If I were at a research institution, I might find… Continue reading JavaScript for teaching and learning
Languages and idiom
This summer, I’ve been going to a French speaking meetup in Crown Heights on Friday evenings. It’s a nice to end the week by simply sitting outside and chatting in French. It’s got me thinking about natural and programming languages. My ideas on this are probably very naive, so please forgive me, and feel free… Continue reading Languages and idiom
Nanogenmo 2021 (part 2)
When I was studying Sanskrit in college, I was really taken by the vocative case. I think that the vocative case is partly what gives Sanskrit its unique feel when it is translated into English. This is probably because sentences with vocative elements don’t really have an exact equivalent in English, which makes them stand… Continue reading Nanogenmo 2021 (part 2)
Why Python is a good choice for academics
I’ve been thinking about the role of Python in higher education. There’s a lot going on in that space, and the TL;DR version of this post is that I think Python is a good language choice for academics. If you’d like to hear my reasons, I have three: Python has a wide range of possible… Continue reading Why Python is a good choice for academics
A reason to like broken Python
Python developers often want their code to be “Pythonic”, usually meaning that they want what they write to be particularly suited to the idiom of the language. To the beginner, this usually seems like an obviously good idea, but so vague as to be hard to put into practice. To be honest, I often opt… Continue reading A reason to like broken Python
Programming language matters
While it is probably true that you can learn to code in any programming language, lately I’ve felt that language choice is nonetheless important. The languages we learn affect the kind of work we end up doing a bit further down the road. I’ve recently begun to notice how leaning to code in Python has… Continue reading Programming language matters
