The value of coding for humanities

“Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.”

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Hello Worlds (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program).” WordPress, 23 May 2010, mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/.

As a prospective CS major, I don’t believe it is very surprising that I agree with Kirschenbaum that humanities students should learn to program. That being said, I don’t entirely disagree with most of what Evan Donahue said in his post, A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program). In fact, I agree with Donahue in the sense that programming is the technical jargon with which computer scientists address questions. Whether you know Python, Java, or C++ doesn’t matter; however, I believe there is an inherent knowledge that comes with programming, which Kirschenbaum highlights, that is the ability to create models. Obviously, programming is not the only way of creating models, but it is a popular and very effective way of creating models. Consequently, I believe that a humanities student who already has an efficient way of creating models loses nothing by simply trying to add another tool to their toolbox.

def factorial(n):
  if n==1:
    return n;
  else:
    return n*factorial(n-1);

The above snippet of code is a simple recursive function that calculates the factorial of a given number. I chose to include this snippet to illustrate how programming can be used to model certain pieces of information, in this example, a mathematical concept. However, I also chose this snippet to illustrate that models don’t always make things easier to understand. With the case of factorials, I find the definition of “the product of an integer and all the integers below it,” much easier to comprehend than the recursive function. I have had experience coding in HTML, CSS, Java, and Python and while I seldom use these languages outside of the classroom right now, I still appreciate the concepts which I have been able to learn through these different languages. Additionally, I believe that programming does a good job of consistently challenging your model-making abilities and forces you to learn new ways of creating models, as I had to learn when understanding recursion.