Should Humanities Students Learn To Code?

The question of whether humanities students should learn to code can elicit different answers from people with different backgrounds and opinions. Well, I would argue that students should not learn how to code unless they want to.

Programming languages math and algorithms are the discourses used by computer scientists to address their concerns just as psycho analysis ethnography and material culture are some of the discourses used to address the concerns of the humanities. The discourse divide is not between the humanities and the computer sciences, but equally much between every subfield therein. Learning to program should be no more and no less enabling than reading Derrida. 

“A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program).” Evan Donahue, 28 May 2010,nhttps://www.hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/2010/05/28/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program .

As a Statistics major, I code in R on a daily basis. But before coming to Carleton, I had never coded and I didn’t really know what coding was. To me, R is just one of the many ways I can use to get the information/visualizations I need. If I want to, I can do the same thing using Python or even by hand. However, I chose to learn R since it was the most efficient way for me to achieve what I wanted (also because Carleton stats classes use R). Depending on your goals, programming can be very helpful, but it should not be mandatory. For humanities students, learning foreign languages or other materials might be more suited to achieve their goals.

As for my previous coding experience, I have taken classes on R, Python, Java, Chuck, and I also took an online class on SQL. My intended major was Computer Science, but after taking Data Structures where I learned Java, I decided not to pursue that path.

<pre>
my_opinion <- "well, you don't have to code to do this"
gsub("(^|[[:space:]])([[:alpha:]])", "\\1\\U\\2", my_opinion, perl = TRUE)
</pre>