My Hot Take on Humanities Students and Programming

I believe that although they are likely to benefit somewhat from learning how to program in this day and age, humanities students should not have to learn how to program.

Learning to program should be no more and no less enabling than reading Derrida.

Evan Donahue, A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction. Everything I looked up while trying to understand who Derrida was and what he did was very confusing and that actually helped me understand what I believe Donahue meant in his quote. Learning to program can seem like a daunting task that is very complicated to someone who has never programmed before. Similarly, reading the writings of an old French philosopher can seem scary to someone who has barely dipped their toes into the world of philosophy. Each has its benefits and can open your eyes to look at the world in a new way. Therefore, each should be equally enabling.

body {
  background: white;
}

This block of CSS code is pretty simple to me, although it might not be to humanities majors with no programming experience. Pretty much all of the key words in the code add up to exactly what it does. It changes the body of the text’s background to white. While it is nice to know what this does, it is just not necessary. With the easy to understand interface of writing platforms like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, changing the background of your text, bolding or italicizing your letters, and many other stylistic changes have become simple to people who know nothing about code.

Although my programming experiences are limited to having learned Python in Intro to Computer Science and Java in Data Structures, I think as a prospective computer science major my stance on the debate is a bit peculiar. From an outsider’s point of view, I would probably assume that most humanities majors would argue that they should not have to program and most computer science majors would argue that they should. However, that is clearly not the case. I think humanities students should learn some programming in a world that is becoming more and more digital, but I don’t think they should be forced to.