Re: Programming Languages for Technical Communicators

[Simon North <north -at- SYNOPSYS -dot- COM>]

Chris Cundiff asked which programming language she should take as a
tech comm student.
>
> I think the answer is that it depends on your purpose in taking such
> a course.

Agreed.

I have spent a lot of my career documenting C and C++. Knowing the
languuges has been a great assistance, although I still refuse to
say that I can actually program in them. However, I learnt
FORTRAN at college (in the days before BASIC) and have also had to
deal with RTL/2, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC, Modula-2 and -3,  Tcl,
and several other languages. I would place such languages within the
"application" area. Knowledge of them (and I'd stress knowledge
rather than competence) will help if you are interested in writing
seriously technical docs (programmer's manuals, etc.).

Away from these, there is a whole class of languages that I would
loosely refer to as pure tech comms languages. These are languages
that you can use as everyday tools. For example, Perl is invaluable
for doing all those text manipulations that keep cropping up (bulk
file renaming, complicated search and replaces, working on a
major scale with FrameMaker MIF files, etc.). If you want to do
anything serious in Interleaf, plan on learning at least a little
Lisp (its Scheme dialect is also extremely valuable if you want to go
on to do technical SGML work).

Java qualifies in both realms. But, to be honest, if you can master
C++ then Java is trivial.


My 10 cents.



Simon North                      north -at- synopsys -dot- com
COSSAP Technical Writer, Aachen, Germany

To be or not to be, those are the parameters.