Coding not Defined

I am against the idea that humanities students should learn how to code. First, it is clear that technology is expanding and becoming an integral part of everybody’s lives more and more every year. Initially. it seems obvious in this scenario that “more technology equals more coding” because coding seems essential to navigate the ever digitizing world. However, I find the opposite to be true. Since the world is moving online, this means that technology is becoming more accessible, and more user-friendly and non-coding tools appear to create on the internet. Take, for instance, making a website where in the past somebody had to learn how to code to make one, but since then, there are countless tools such as WordPress that allow one to create a website without any coding at all. For instance, one can write this on WordPress without any coding:

• There
• is
• no
• coding
• here.

Versus with coding.

<ul>
  <li>There</li>
  <li>is</li>
  <li>coding</li>
  <li>here</li>
</ul>

Moreover, as there are an abundant amount of tutorials and resources about learning to code, coding is still difficult and inaccessible for many people, and it is counter-productive for some people to spend that time learning to code when they could do other more relevant things. Donahue mentions. that “[he thinks that] students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.” Again, it emphasizes the idea that not knowing how to program prevents you from interacting with technology.

With that being said, “coding” to me feels like an imprecise buzzword a lot of time, and I am honestly confused about what it actually means most of the time. Using these online tools considered “coding”? In practice, you are not actually writing any code, but you are making something digitally. If the question were “should humanities students work with technology?” My answer would be “yes,” but coding is not a necessity to present one’s ideas in a virtual landscape.

I am a computer science major, so I have an ample amount of coding experience. I first learned how to code in middle school, and programmed in my free in high school. I personally find coding to be quite fun and powerful. Hence, why I decided to major in Computer Science (although there are many classes where you do not do any coding ). I have worked a lot in Python and Java in the past.