I strongly believe humanities students should learn how to code, as it is a valuable skill that can be useful in the future. Now I want to emphasize, that I am not saying that students should learn full-stack or development, compiler & language design, and advanced theories of computer science. I am also not saying that humanities students should learn complicated topics in programming such as sorting algorithms and run-time. I am encouraging students to learn the fundamentals of computer programming so that if they need to write code or even utilize code that someone else has written, they will be much better off compared to if they never learned how to code. Furthermore, with a basic idea of coding, a humanities major can work with data scientists, AI experts, software engineers, and professional computer scientists more effectively. While it is true that there exist a lot of AI tools that can write decent code, I still believe it is important to have a basic understanding of how that code works. From my experience in taking humanities courses at Carleton, a big part of assignments and research were focused on my ability to defend the accuracy of my sources. With this, if you take code that you have no understanding of and try to incorporate it into your work, it’s going to be more difficult to defend the accuracy of your work. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that AI is not always going to correct, in fact, the more complicated your project is, the more room for error AI will have to provide inaccurate and non-functional code. Lastly, computer science can be very useful in analyzing data and conducting data analysis, which I believe is relevant in the field of humanities where researchers are always studying data in their analysis.
Knowledge of a foreign language is desirable so that a scholar does not have to rely exclusively on existing translations and so that the accuracy of others’ translations can be scrutinized.
Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program
This quote resonates with me on my stance as it reflects my argument on how it is beneficial having a basic understanding of coding can be very beneficial.
As a senior in computer science, I have a strong background in programming. However, it is easy to get rusty in languages I don’t often code, such as HTML/CSS. With this, I decided to do my tutorials on HTML/CSS to get a quick refresher as admittedly I am pretty rusty with those front-end language models. One reason why I pursued computer science, is because of the ability to compute calculations at an efficient and fast rate. Below is some R code from my introduction to statistics class I took last Fall.
MnGroundwater <- read.csv("http://math.carleton.edu/Stat120/RLabManual/MnGroundwater.csv")
mean(MnGroundwater$Lead)These 2 line of code was able to read in a data set and calculate the mean. Note, that this dataset was very large and had over 750 entries. However, this simple line of code was able to compute the mean in less than a second, which I find very fun.
3 thoughts on “Lab 2”
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I really enjoyed reading about how you think it is important to learn only the basic fundamentals of coding as a tool for better understanding and possible collaboration with other areas of study. I really agree with this because I do think it is important to learn the basics for the purpose of understanding, but if humanities students take time to become proficient and learn everything about coding, then that would distract and take away from their focus on the humanities. I appreciate how you chose one of the most basic, yet very useful lines of code that is often used in R as it is a great example as to how basic coding knowledge can support humanities students by reading a very large data set in a matter of seconds instead of the countless hours it would take without the help of coding.
I completely agree with your argument Khizar! I think learning the fundamentals of coding is very important, but I also understand that learning higher-level theories of computer science and complex programming skills is unnecessary. However, by learning at least basic code-writing abilities, it will be much easier to collaborate with software engineers, data scientists, etc. With technology becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday lives, I believe coding is a skill that everyone can benefit from.
I agree that humanities students don’t need to learn full-stack development, but they should at least know the fundamentals of coding. Having a basic understanding can help them work better with experts in technical fields and ensure the accuracy of their work. I also like how you mentioned refreshing your skills in HTML/CSS; it’s a good reminder that even experienced coders need to revisit languages they don’t use often to stay sharp.