Coding and its Beauty … Is it Really Worth it?

While I agree that learning to code in any sufficiently used higher level programming language can create or open up “new worlds or universes” per se, humanities students should not be required to learn how to code. First off, what do I mean by new worlds and universes? In the realistic sense, coding is definitely an art form. Yes Kirschenbaum, programming is beautiful. Indeed, “code work blends functional computer code with creative composition.” However, the process is just too long. 

“… 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)”

At the end of the day, programming is just jargon. Let me rephrase this. At the inherent stage, a programming language is just jargon, and this jargon takes years upon years to fully learn and comprehend. To reach the stage, where a programmer has begun his “world-making” requires understanding of the language’s core, to an extent of learning about the system’s internals. So, why spend hours learning a programming language just to hear coders talk so profusely about the avant-garde, awe-inspiring aspect of the language but not be able to experience it yourself. Obviously, computer science majors will be able to catch glimpses here and there into this “world-making” concept and even experience it sometimes with his or her own code during their undergraduate years. However, reinforcing the idea that coding is this beautiful art form and garners an opportunity to build new worlds and having other students with majors in different studies learn to code are completely separable matters. You can’t really do both, and spending hours learning a language just to catch a glimpse of it doesn’t make much sense either.

I have coding knowledge in Java and C++ and a very rough and basic understanding of lower level programming languages like Assembly.

Below is some javascript code constructing some objects blocks, which I think are very useful and sort of define one of the many methods different coders can use to make their code unique to others’. The way a coder wants to chunk off their data is unique.

var class = {
    averageAge: 19
};

class.info = {
    field: "Digital Humanities",
    Level: 110
};