Do We Need to Hack in the Humanities?

There is no doubt about it: coding is a useful, important tool in the modern era. But does everyone need to know how to code? I say no: just like medical knowledge is certainly something the world shouldn’t be without, not everyone needs to be a doctor. And while of course it’s going to be helpful in certain situations, it isn’t necessary for everyone to learn. I side with Evan Donahue in the argument whether or not to code, agreeing that coding is a useful tool, but not a necessity.

“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’ll admit, my coding experience is very limited. I briefly learned some Javascript in middle school, but other than that, this class has been my door to the world of coding. Despite my lack of knowledge in the field, I’ve gotten along just fine in my exploration of the humanities. I didn’t feel a great loss because I didn’t know how to code when I began to write and explore the English language more, and I don’t believe that’s going to change. Coding isn’t necessary to submit work to a publisher, much less to write the work itself. While not being able to code may affect different humanities in different ways, at their core, humanities don’t come from code- they come from humans.

With that being said, please enjoy this poem I coded using the <pre> tag. The poem starts with one syllable and adds another each line until it’s reached a maximum number of syllables, and then reduces syllables each line until it comes to one again.

I
  could write
              this poem
                       faster if I
           didn't have
   to code
it