Lab 2

I believe that humanities students should not learn to code. From my perspective, humanities students should focus on their strengths to contribute meaningfully to discussions about technology and culture. Learning to code requires significant time and effort. Once they decide to learn coding, the goal is not just to read and write simple code, but to develop new tools themselves to analyze and visualize data. This process would take a huge amount of time and distract students from developing more important skills, such as critical thinking and contextual analysis. Moreover, with advancements in technology, there are many existing tools, including AI, that allow humanities students to perform digital analysis without needing to write code themselves. These powerful tools, like AI, make data analysis and visualization more accessible to students, enabling them to focus on their thinking and interpretation.

While programming will indeed usefully equip one better to understand computer scientific discourses, it should NOT be taken as the necessary precondition to engaging with the computer sciences and all who consider themselves scholars of the humanities should realize that the discourse of programming is only the technical jargon with which computer scientists address many of the very same questions that one encounters every day in the humanities.

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

I started learning coding last year. As a beginner, it was difficult for me to complete assignments correctly in Intro to CS classes. It felt like learning a completely new foreign language. I spent a lot of time working on assignments and learning new syntax and structures. However, after taking more classes and exploring different CS courses, I became more familiar with coding and programming languages like Python and C. I realized that coding is a powerful tool in many areas. For example, in one assignment, I wrote code to read data from files and create a table from it. Additionally, my partner and I wrote code for a small game in a program. Through coding, we can achieve our goals more conveniently and efficiently.

However, I still hold the opinion that humanities students are not required to learn coding. Since most of the tools we aim to develop in CS assignments and use in humanities projects already exist, it is not worthwhile to spend so much time learning to code. For example, in my last CS assignment, I was asked to write code for calculations with different number bases. Completing the assignment took hours, but as a humanities student, if I just wanted to perform the calculations or data analysis, it would have only taken a few minutes to find an online calculator to accomplish the task.

//A part of the assignment
int subtract(int *input1, int *input2, int base, int *result)
{
    int index1 = bignum_length(input1) - 1;
    int index2 = bignum_length(input2) - 1;
    int result_index = 0;
    int borrow = 0;

    while (index1 >= 0 || index2 >= 0)
    {
        int digit1, digit2;
        if (index1 >= 0)
            digit1 = input1[index1];
        else
            digit1 = 0;

        if (index2 >= 0)
            digit2 = input2[index2];
        else
            digit2 = 0;

        int difference = digit1 - digit2 - borrow;

        if (difference < 0){
            difference += base; 
            borrow = 1;
        }else{
            borrow = 0;
        }

        result[result_index++] = difference;

        index1--;
        index2--;
    }

    while (result_index > 1 && result[result_index - 1] == 0){
        result_index--;
    }

    result[result_index] = BIGNUM_POSITIVE;

    reverse(result);
    return 0;
}