Should Humanities Students Learn to Code?

I think the answer to this question has a lot of layers, so I’m going to start in the middle and build my way out. I think that humanities students should absolutely find a way to make their findings, their studies, their research, etc. accessible to the public. One demographic of people that have very limited access to historical studies is people who can’t see or can’t read for whatever reason. In theory, a humanities student that wants to make their research more accessible should find a way to turn their written work into something that blind people can understand. So, should a Humanities student spend hours, days, weeks, or even months to learn how to program a text-to-speech reader so that their research can be accessed by people with vision loss? No, not unless they think it’s really necessary. What they should do is figure out how to implement a text-to-speech program that was written by a computer science student, in the same way that the computer science student shouldn’t spend years collecting research on a historical topic when they could just see what the humanities academics have figured out about it. Donahue explains this quite nicely:

Not only could the two areas usefully benefit from one another, as per Kirschenbaum’s essay, but furthermore that in many ways the two are working on exactly the same projects and the very idea that they are, a priori, separate and distinct bodies of knowledge may be the king hobgoblin of any attempts to create something that professes to be a digital humanities situated somewhere between the two.

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

As a Computer Science major, I actually have a lot of experience with a lot of different programming languages. Most of the commonly used ones (Java, Python, C++) are like different languages that have a lot of the same words. There’s a structure that they all follow, you can put on one mindset hat and program in all of them with relative ease. A lot of the older or less commonly used ones require a lot more thought. A Python student can switch to learning Java with the same difficulty as an English speaker learns Spanish. The same python student could try to learn scheme, and it would be as difficult as that same English speaker learning mandarin. To show what I mean, below are two examples of a method that prints “Hello World” 10 times, one written in Python and one written in Java. Note how the two examples are almost identical in theory, but the words you see written are completely different.

for x in range(10):
   print("Hello World")


for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++){
   System.out.println("Hello World");
}