My experience with JavaScript:
I personally have a lot of experience with Java, so moving to JavaScript was extremely easy for me. I actually learned that JavaScript is much easier to use! Which is always nice to know.
My Stance on whether Humanities students should learn to code:
I believe that all Humanities students should learn how to code, at least up to an intermediate level. DH is the future of the humanities and if any humanities student wants to stay relevant in the future, he should probably learn how to code, unless he wants to be at a major disadvantage.
Some people say that if a humanities student wants to build a DH project, he should just go to a professional programmer, but one major disadvantage of this is that the person who is programming for you will most likely not understand what you want them to do properly, and so your DH project won’t turn out as well as is would have turned out if you made it yourself. Also, in the long run, it is much more cost effective to simply learn how to code than to constantly pay for a professional.
Learning a programming language has the same benefits of learning a regular language. It allows a humanities student to engage in a wider variety of things. Kirschenbaum wrote in his article, “A computer language will not replace the comparativist’s need to know Spanish or French or German, or the budding medievalist’s command of Latin and Greek. But what about the student of contemporary literature interested in, say, electronic poetry or the art of the novel in the information age? Or the student interested in computer-assisted text analysis, who may need to create specialized programs that don’t yet exist? For these students, I believe proficiency in a computer language can fulfil many of the same functions — accessibility, self-reliance, heightened critical awareness — as knowledge of a traditional foreign language.” This is evident especially in the digital humanities, where one can gain additional knowledge and information about the project if they can understand what happens ‘under the hood’.
Coding is something that is based purely on logic. A good programmer is someone who is extremely logical. And most humanities students deal in subjects where they have to critically analyse works and use logic based skills. Therefore, most humanities students would not have that hard of a time learning how to code. And those scared of the math involved in coding should know that an intermediate knowledge of coding requires nothing more than basic arithmetic and algebra, which I’m confident that almost every scholar has knowledge of. Therefore I pose the question. Is there any reason why humanities students should not learn how to code? Because I see nothing but benefits.
I totally agree that humanities students have to build skill-sets that would translate well to learning to code; why do you think that programming and the computer sciences are so often regarded with apprehension and negativity within the humanities? Even if CS isn’t actually thought of that way, the stereotype is definitely prevalent.
I think it’s because a lot of humanities students think that coding is extremely technical and requires a lot of math, even though it doesn’t. Also, the humanities are rather conservative in nature. By that, I mean that within the humanities, the main way of voicing your ideas is through papers and journal articles. Very little importance is given to digital humanities as a way to voice your thoughts and ideas, and that’s because the DH doesn’t follow the standard format that is so well known in the humanities. A website doesn’t have a citation format and most DH projects aren’t often cited simply because of the fact that they are websites and not journal articles, despite the DH projects being extremely well researched. I think that the humanities sphere has to first accept the DH as a valid way of sharing academic ideas. And only then can the humanities sphere and the computer science sphere interact properly.