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A gentle introduction to...
Aug. 30th, 2007 07:14 pmMy 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?
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?