I came to the German language as a kid. It was a natural choice as my research language in grad school. My maternal Grandmother’s family was from Prussia and fled before the Third Reich committed genocide. Visit a concentration camp sometime in your life. Six million lives were extinguished during the Holocaust. Had she not left, I wouldn’t be writing this article. Hitler was evil. The language is masterful. The culture produced some amazing human beings over the centuries.
Picking up a computer language after German was a breeze. In fact, the first programming language I learned formally was ANSI C, as the instructor. So much for taking an intro to programming course. I got paid to learn along with my students. The text for the course was Applications Programming in ANSI C — long out of print. C as an application programming language defies the imagination. But, it is a killer way to learn to think like a data scientist and a German. If you want to be an Ace of the Base Data Scientist, the C language should be your mother tongue. I moved on to the SAS/C compiler and SAS as my first compute environment. Viewing the field as “the science of data” has been a fun and rewarding career.

#linguistics #cognitive-psychology #german #data-science #data-visualization