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Carolina Code Conference
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2024 speaker

Liz Alvarez

Liz Alvarez

Data Scientist and Aspiring Linguist

Spartanburg, SC

Liz has had a varied programming career, starting with copying BASIC programs out of magazines when she was in elementary school, followed by coding TI-82s in high school, using MATLAB, C++, Java, and LabVIEW in college, and then moving on to arduinos, Scratch, Python, SQL, R, etc. In spite of all of that, Liz did not ever consider herself a programmer until a couple years ago, when she left her decade-long career of being a high school math teacher to become a data scientist. Now, Liz works in the ecommerce space dealing mainly with natural language processing (NLP) models.

2024 · lightning

When You're a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

How do the programming languages we use affect the way we interact with the world? Do object-oriented languages make us see everything in terms of the relationships between each other? Do block-based languages cause us to be more concrete with our speech and worse at memorizing? Conversely, does that mean there are better languages for us to learn based on how we already think about the world? In this talk, we'll explore different some different types of programming languages, their backgrounds, purposes and main uses, and how those languages may (or may not) affect the way we interact with the world and what that all means for us as we continue learning.

From the talk