While programming will indeed usefully equip one better to understand computer scientific discourses, it should NOT be taken as the necessary precondition to engaging with the computer sciences
Evan Donahue, A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program
This quote from Evan Donahue summarizes exactly how I feel about the debate over the necessity of coding for humanities majors. When I entered college, I already had experience doing simple website design for past humanities projects that I had undertaken in high school, and while it might have been nice to know some fancier tricks to make the site the best it could have been, I still look back on those projects fondly. Honestly, if I had truly wanted to use some of those tricks I would have done what I did whenever I encountered a problem in any other area of my projects: asked someone who knew what they were doing, and learned from them. This opinion was generated far before I had ever taken a foray into coding, and sadly, after I have attempted to learn how, my opinion has not been changed.
That is simply because my first experience coding was, to be honest, almost entirely negative. While the tutorials for this class were not entirely my first experience with coding software in college, as I used r in a statistics class earlier this year, this is certainly my first experience with more than solving math problems. In my experience trying to do basic html, I went from one problem to another, and only solved one problem off of luck as opposed to skill. I used textedit software to make the code, and ran into a problem where, even after I saved the file as a “plain text” file, it reverted back to a “Rich text” file, and therefore did not process any of my code. After finally realizing this simply because I had tried everything else I could think of, I copied all my old code into this new document, and after viewing it in my browser it actually worked. However, when I went to go back and edit the raw text file, it had changed to display my output, and my raw code was nowhere to be seen.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My first web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is my first web page</h1>
<h2>What is this</h2>
<p>A simple page put together using HTML </p>
<h2>Why this is</h2>
<ul>
<li>To learn HTML</li>
<li>To show my Comp Sci roommate that I actually am intelligent</li>
<li>Because someone told me to touch grass so I’m doing the opposite.</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>What my raw code looked like
This problem greatly slowed down my ability to do the remainder of the tutorial, and honestly left me with a bitter taste in my mouth for the rest of the training. Even after following all of the instructions to the letter I was still forced to jump through hoops for something so simple. Even when I made website pages in high school, I did not have to spend an hour figuring out the literal basics, and I walked away from this feeling like I did not particularly learn much.
I enjoyed reading your story about your first experience with coding and why this has convinced you that coding shouldn’t be necessary for humanities majors. I do believe that this is a personal experience and cannot be generalized to all people majoring in humanities. Having said this, I believe that coding should be a choice. Just like any other subject certain people are good at it and others not so much. Thank you for sharing!