"Programming is an extremely useful skill in many areas of linguistics and in other language-related fields like speech and hearing sciences, psychology, psycholinguistics, quantitative literary studies, etc. Within linguistics, it used to be the case that programming skills were really only required for computational linguists, but this is far from true these days. Programming is being used in phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, essentially every area of linguistic investigation. This change reflects broader methodological changes in the field, a response to the fact that: I) more and more data are available electronically; and II) that we have much richer techniques for examining and manipulating massive amounts of electronic data. Here are some examples of what you can do with fairly modest programming skills: Build a simple list of occurring words from a text file written in some language along with the frequency of those words. Find items for psycholinguistic or phonetic experiments from text resources, e.g. imagine you need frequent two-syllable words that begin with a threeconsonant cluster and don't otherwise contain nasal consonants.

Construct every possible one-syllable word given a set of possible onsets, vowels, and codas"--.