Should humanities majors learn how to code? Yes, if you can and want to. No, if not.
“The exercise of thinking through what it takes to model a snowball in a believable fashion goes a long way toward capturing the appeal of what I mean by programming as world-making.”
Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”, May 23, 2013.
One benefit of learning how to code as a humanities major is the skill itself that expands the resources you have to obtain, analyze, and share information. Another benefit that Matthew Kirschenbaum discusses in “Hellow Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program),” is the thought process involved in creating worlds in our minds and transforming them into models that the computer can understand. He gives an example of modeling a snowball by thinking about the basics of one so that the computer can reproduce, digitally, an object that we call a snowball. This snowball example was similar to my first coding experience when I took an introductory computer science course. However, other than the impression that coding is like talking to the computer with an uncooperative translator, learning how to code did not change my view of world-making nor make me think that I am in any way more apt to study the humanities.
The reason why I felt this way is because every other academic discipline offers the experience of world-making or model-building that is no different from the snowball example for coding. For example, as a chemistry major, I appreciate chemistry because drawing molecular structures and chemical reactions is a powerful skill to build a model that translates between what humans see and what chemical or physical change is actually occurring. To me, chemistry is a language that I spent years trying to understand so that I could explore and communicate with the chemical world. While for others with less experience, chemistry would be to them what coding is to me: trying to talk to the atoms with an uncooperative translator.
I should make it clear that I have only taken one introductory course in computer science and saying that I should spend more time coding to fully appreciate its power is a valid argument. Yet, until the time comes when I decide to try coding again, my stance will remain unchanged. Why learn how to code if there are programmers out there who can become your translator going from a human language to a programming language, which then translates it to even more abstract instructions that the machine can understand?
def main():
answer=input("Welcome to blackjack! Draw Card (Y/N)?:")
if answer == "Y" or answer == "y":
startGame()
elif answer == "N" or answer == "n":
print("Goodbye!")
return
else:
input("Type either Y or N:")
This is a snippet of a code to start a game of blackjack that I worked on.
An, I was really interested in your discussion of how you see chemistry, and your claim that chemistry is a language that you have learned to speak. As an English major, I often see a divide between the humanities and the sciences; but I love Kirschenbaum’s point that literature can be seen as “secondary worlds” (quoted from poet W.H. Auden) — as essentially building a model. Your comment helped me to connect that model-building to other disciplines, ones that I usually think of as very distinct from literature.
An, I think that you bring up a really excellent point in mentioning that computer science is not the only “language,” with which one can communicate. Your comparison to chemistry is really insightful, and I think it points to the fact that the field of computer science tends to center itself as a sort of “academic panacea,” when in reality it is simply one of many ways that one can approach a problem.
An, I love your comparison of learning to code to learning about chemistry. Both the physical and chemical worlds are based on languages, and those who study them must learn these languages for them to be interpreted. Also, I’m impressed with your code. How did you decide what game you were going to create?