I believe that humanities students should learn to code. I say this statement as someone who only began coding last year. The reason is that with coding, a user learns the syntax that supports how the code will run. Similar to putting thoughts on paper to make a readable argument for humanities classes, coding is another way to communicate a person’s thoughts. In this way, people are able to understand one another through a different medium. This is important because understanding creates growth, so as a person codes for a project, this project will continue to evolve with the help of other people and lead to more possibilities. From this, I resonate with what Kirschenbaum said:
“the most important audience for any computer program is a human being (because the code will be continuously worked over and shared by numerous different programmers over the course of its existence).”
Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program
My interest in coding has taken off since last year, so I believe that I am still a novice in the field of programming and coding. My coding experience includes R, Mathematica, and Python. Due to this, I chose a beginning HTML tutorial and a beginning JavaScript tutorial. While learning these two tutorials, I was reminded of my work with LaTeX from my math classes. I did not understand LaTeX in the beginning, but because of these tutorials, I feel more confident in trying LaTeX one more time. I am excited to work with other types of code like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Here is my attempt to code using the custom HTML block:
"Hello World"
Three things about me!
- My name is Angelina Kong, but my preferred name is Lenn
- I go to Carleton College
- My favorite color is blue!
Here is my attempt using the code block:
<pre>
<p><strong> "Hello World" </strong></p>
<h1> Three things about me! </h1>
<ol>
<li> My name is Angelina Kong, but my preferred name is Lenn </li>
<li> I go to Carleton College </li>
<li> My favorite color is blue! </li>
</ol>
</pre>