A gentle introduction to...

[tahnan]

My wife, going through a pile of stuff looking for a paper I'd misfiled, came across a handout from my undergrad days called "A Gentle Introduction to the Lambda Calculus". I found this fascinating, since last semester I wrote a handout for some of my less mathematically inclined students called "A Gentle(r) Introduction to Lambda Notation". Did I dredge this out of the depths of my memory?

Apparently not--Googling the phrase "A Gentle Introduction To" gets almost 300,000 hits, and a casual scan of the first hundred suggests that it's a standard turn of phrase in computer programming: the web offers gentle introductions to SQL, Haskell, XML, ML, SOAP, Namespaces, Symbolic Computation, TeX, Internet feeds, optical design, wavelets, category theory, Stata.... (And, oddly, nanotechnology, a book on Amazon by someone I knew at Brown.) It's not surprising, then, that Mark Johnson used it; he's a computational linguist.

So I ask the more computationally-oriented out there: where did the phrase originate? Who first wrote a gentle introduction to something?

Comments

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

it's conspiracy to get us less compy-minded folk to think it's not all bad. rather like A Gentle Introduction to Hairshirts

[rpipuzzleguy.livejournal.com]

I started reading this entry as a continuation of the subject line and thought you were gently introducting us to your wife.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Which begs the question... would 'A gentle introduction to his wife' be gentle to his wife, or to those receiving the introduction? Who are we more concerned about scarring? :)

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

That is just dirty. ;-)

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

hi!

[dtm]

"A Gentle Introduction to TeX" dates from 1991, according to a bit of poking around Google Groups. That probably makes it the earliest of that bunch. A phrase in the TeX literature would also migrate well to lots of otherwise pretty disparate disciplines.

I first saw the phrase in connection with "A Gentle Introduction to Haskell", which dates from 1999.