It’s Important to Learn How to Code

There is debate among academics on whether Humanities students should learn how to code. In my perspective, the answer is clear: yes! Typically, when people argue against learning how to code it stems from the belief that somebody else will be able to do it for you. Although this is true, there are plenty of developers out there that you can pay to fulfill your vision, learning how to code has benefits beyond the final product.

Learning how to code is all about broadening your perspective on what can be achieved using computers. Just like speaking a native language will make it easier for a historian to analyze primary sources, being literate in code makes a computer a more powerful tool. By being able to write their own programs (or be able to talk technically with developers), Humanities researchers are able to get exactly what they want out of the computer. I don’t believe that Humanities students need to write machine code, but understanding how websites work, natural language processing, and other relevant tools is incredibly powerful. If this doesn’t resonate with you, then note that it is cheaper to code it yourself than to have it done by anybody else.

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Although a basic example, I have included above the code in HTML to make an image function as a hyperlink. Understanding that this is possible and very easy to do might inspire a Humanities student to build a website whose navigation consists primarily of images instead of words.

When I was reading Donahue’s argument on why Humanities students should NOT learn to code, I found that his strongest argument was that students should “not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences”. Although I agree that curiosity for the computer sciences should not be shut down, I find it hard to imagine being able to engage (more than just superficially) with more complex and relevant concepts in computer science without at least a basic understanding of programming.

As for my own experience with coding, I have the majority of my experience from a physics lens. I use code to build simulations, find numerical solutions to differential equations, analyze data, etc… In research coding literacy has become mandatory in most research labs. Coding also gives so much flexibility in how I can work with data.