I am for the humanities students learning to code, or at least learning the basics of how a computer software works. I am not saying that they should learn to code an entire website from scratch. I am saying that they should build an intuition for how the whole system works so that when faced with a situation where the templates fail them, they are more knowledgeable to hack them and make it truly their own.
Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.
Kirschenbaum
In addition, programming teaches us how to think logically. This skill of logically laying out the objective, connecting the different components in a carefully crafted manner, weighing the different options, making the optimal choice, and delivering a result is a skill that is essential for humanities major. When writing an essay, or a report, this kind of logical thinking can only help!
For me, my coding experience started in freshman year, when I stumbled upon an Intro to Computer Science class because I couldn’t get into a class I wanted. I had no prior experience with coding whatsoever so my thought initially was this is scary, I don’t know what’s going on..etc. But as the term went on, I gradually realized that coding is quite fun. The fact that all the things were formalized into inputs and outputs, and as strange as it sounds, how Python was nicely formatted with nested indentation appealed to my neat freak self. So began my computer science journey.
def hello_world():
print("Hi my name is ")
name = ["Y", "E", "M", "I"]
for letter in name:
print(letter)
In terms of specifically web development, over the last summer break, I had extensive Javascript/JQuery development experience at an internship, and minimal PHP exposure (I’m sorry I forgot to fill out the form). This past few weeks, I have been developing my own e commerce website using React and Express (taking a Udemy course) and am currently applying those skills to developing a website for our comps project. My most confident backend framework is Django, and my most confident frontend framework is React.
