While I do find basic programming knowledge useful, I do not think humanities students should learn to code. However, I don’t like the prompt of this debate because it is too ambiguous. Would a basic level of programming understanding come in handy at some point in a humanist’s career? Probably. Is programming knowledge vital or even useful for a lot of humanities work? No (this is a complete guess). I could ask this about other disciplines too. Does a computer scientist need to understand how a computer works from the ground up? No. Would it help at some point in their career? Probably. Does a chemist need to know multiple foreign languages so they can better understand foreign research papers? No. Would it help? Probably. Just because the computer sciences are “relevant areas of concern” to humanists, as Evan Donahue argues, doesn’t mean all humanists need to learn computer science to be successful in their work.
Before this course, I have taken CS 101 and 201, where I was introduced to Python and Java, respectively. I have always wondered what the differences are between Java and JavaScript, and it was interesting to compare the two. From what I saw, they are pretty similar, with some of the bigger differences being how they initialize/define variables and how to create classes and functions within them. HTML was completely new for me, but I think I understand enough of the basics to get by.
I’m not sure how to use code to support my argument that this discussion is confusing, so I will instead link an interesting blog post I found that is tangential to this topic.
