Why you might want to learn to program
这里有一句话说的很有意思:
If you don't program, your research process will always be at the mercy of those who do. (记不得是谁说的了,知道的C友告诉我一下。)
http://niche-canada.org/member-projects/programming-historian/ch2.html
一本在线全文阅读的书,提出“历史研究者最好学会编程而便于挖掘历史事实”……
Why you might want to learn to program
We think that at least some historians really will need to learn how to program. Think of it like learning how to cook. You may prefer fresh pasta to boxed macaroni and cheese, but if you don't want to be stuck eating the latter, you have to learn to cook or pay someone else to do it for you. Learning how to program is like learning to cook in another way: it can be a very gradual process. One day you're sitting there eating your macaroni and cheese and you decide to liven it up with a bit of Tabasco, Dijon mustard or Worcestershire sauce. Bingo! Soon you're putting grated cheddar in, too. You discover that the ingredients that you bought for one dish can be remixed to make another. You begin to linger in the spice aisle at the grocery store. People start buying you cookware. You get to the point where you're willing and able to experiment with recipes. Although few people become master chefs, many learn to cook well enough to meet their own needs.
If you don't program, your research process will always be at the mercy of those who do.
At this point you might object that some of your primary sources are not in digital form and won't be for the foreseeable future. We get this. We're not suggesting that historians no longer need to know how to use material sources in real archives. What we're suggesting is that the rest of your scholarly life has already gone digital. You communicate electronically using e-mail and mailing lists; you search library catalogs and archival finding aids online; you submit drafts of monographs and articles electronically; you present yourself to the world on one or more websites; you have to put up lecture notes or submit grades online; an awful lot of the information that you need daily is already on the web. To use another food metaphor, imagine that digital sources are like sugar (and who wouldn't like to think of them that way?) In medieval Europe, sugar was a rare and expensive spice. Although some people might know how to use it in a dish, most people didn't ever need to think about it. Fast forward to the late 19th century, when sugar made up a relatively large proportion of many European diets. Not everyone needed to know how to make dessert, but it was no longer a rare skill. In the 21st century, some forms of sugar (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup) have become very difficult to avoid.