I guess what NYTimes articles praising liberal arts education miss out on is following:
No one is denying importance of learning history, literature, etc. What people have begun doubting is if its really worth to spend 200k$ & four years majoring in liberal arts alone, vs. Majoring in Computer Science while taking courses in / reading literature.
This article is equivalent to telling a competitive swimmer, to study calculus since Navier-Stokes equations governing fluid dynamics (and thus water) require understanding of calculus to be solved.
The question worth answering is why quality liberal arts education still has such a high price tag? Especially when the monetary returns are so poor?
It's something of a Veblen good for the wealthy[1]. They can say to their friends that little Johnny is studying 19th century basket-weaving at Harvard. Little Johnny can then go on to get a PhD and advise his parents and their friends on the most culturally significant baskets to purchase to properly signal that they have the requisite taste to accompany their money.
It seems to me then that college, and liberal arts in particular, were meant to be pursued by the wealthy upper class, who wouldn't mind dropping that kind of money on a degree whose (monetary) ROI is so bad.
It actually makes sense when you think of who the first college students were: its only very recently that we've embraced the idea of college education for everyone.
A very high fraction of the economy is arts and media-based; in some locales (such as L.A.) it may well be over 50%.
You are not going to get good architects, designers, story-tellers, graphic artists, lawyers, and even politicians, if no one is willing to obtain the appropriate education. And this is only for the "practical" careers; society also needs its academics and historians.
branding. you can get a liberal arts education for a fraction of the cost by traveling the world for the same amount of time. but that's unfortunately not apparently worth much to anyone. but the liberal arts education brand and rhetoric are as strong as ever.
my take, most people are machines in terms of work. their employers could care less who they are as people as long as they do the work, take orders, and don't create unnecessary shit. maybe just maybe you might be able to wiggle your way into management if you have a liberal arts education, but then you need to spend just as much time getting good at writing code, and doing it constantly 9-5.
better a computer science degree and an mba if that's what your goal is... and spend two years before that backpacking to round yourself out.
you can get a liberal arts education for a fraction of the cost by traveling the world for the same amount of time.
A lousy liberal arts education, maybe. By traveling, you see a lot of different viewpoints of average people around the world. But by reading, you get to see into the minds of the greatest people who ever lived.
Both of those things are good, but there is a difference.
>>By traveling, you see a lot of different viewpoints of average people around the world. But by reading, you get to see into the minds of the greatest people who ever lived.
Agreed and today we can read the great works almost freely thanks to projects like Gutenberg [1] and Internet Archive [2]. So, essentially you don't need to spend $200k for this type of knowledge. I have educated myself thanks to the books on these sites. Of course, I didn't get access to the network of people that a Harvard graduate might seem to have. So, you have to figure out if it is worth to spend $200k or whatever to have access to that network.
It's not just reading though. Most of the value in a good liberal arts education comes from discussion with peers, and professors guiding the reading in a way that helps to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. Many 'great thinkers' cannot just be picked up off the shelf.
Yes the discussions and debates do help. But this can also be had today with high quality forums (e.g. HN forum, google groups etc).
>>Many 'great thinkers' cannot just be picked up off the shelf.
That's where a little bit of internet literacy (mainly the google-fu skills) helps a lot. It's not that difficult to acquire it either. If you acquire these skills (e.g. in your high school) then finding great thinkers is not so much of a problem.
In fact, I did it exactly in such a manner: I am from a third world Asian country, where such great professors are mostly non-existent or if they do exist they are almost always inaccessible to poor people like me. So, what did I do?
I struggled with Google for some time, and with the help of some sites I acquired the immensely important google-fu skills. Then I landed on the Wikipedia knowledge-galaxy. From there the access to 'great thinkers' was just a click away.
As far as discussions and debates are concerned, then I read books presenting opposing views on important issues like religion, economics and politics.
e.g. In case of religion the theists' point of views, Bible, Quran etc on one hand and Plato's dialogues, Darwin's theory, Voltaire, Khalil Jibran, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris on the other hand;
Marx's Das Capital and communist manifesto on one hand and criticism of Marx and Atlas Shrugged on the other.
I engage in online debates on forums like this.
Thanks to today's internet and the sites like the ones I mentioned in the earlier comment on this thread, a person who has far less money than $200K (hardly $2500 per year) can actually acquire so much knowledge.
It's not bragging though, as the same knowledge has made me more humbled too.
That's a good insight. I endorse your reading strategy, if only more people used it!
I think our society is still struggling to deal with the fact that the information distribution just suddenly stopped being a concern.
You just spent 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
- Will, Good Will Hunting
It is much easier to grasp the network of knowledge that exists when you have Wikipedia and forums like HN. Having context is important because it helps direct you. Being part of the tribe is immensely important if you're to be motivated over decades.
The main problems now are motivation and focus. I am confident these are solvable problems but there's a lot of people out there who haven't even heard of Wikipedia. They're not ready for it yet.
I am much less worried about the Net than what the Television did to us. The Net is intrinsically deeper than the Television.
There is a sports commentator called Joe Rogan who expresses this well. He often exclaims how much of a knucklehead (his own words) he was before the Internet. It opened up a new vista to him. Not everybody will be as immediately perceptive as Rogan but I see even people who limited technology skills gradually enhancing their comprehension on a range of issues. It won't lead to utopia but it will definitely make the future more interesting, and ultimately that's all I ask of any technology.
> Many 'great thinkers' cannot just be picked up off the shelf
If they are that great yes, they can. Great thinkers should put into words stuff that it's believed to be general truths, no matter how you phrase them. You don't need a Harvard education to "get" Rousseau nor Hobbes.
And on top that we have guys like Epicurus, who ~2,300 years ago was saying that his education had been bollocks and that he hadn't learned anything from his professors, but who nevertheless managed to have quite an influence on Western philosophy and thought.
Peer discussions in liberal arts classes aren't of great quality at most universities. Although I certainly would agree that thoughtful conversations in the humanities are good things, they are rare to find in a typical university where liberal arts is pushed on students because "they can't handle STEM".
Even if the conversations WERE of good educational quality, are they truly worth the extra time to graduation that they entail? Remember, the $100K pricetag on four years at a state flagship is borne mostly by middle-class kids trying to improve their chances at good careers. Bureaucrats forcing them to take unnecessary liberal arts classes are important players in today's storied student loan crisis.
if the great humanities works are so easily "confused and misunderstood" maybe they weren't that great to begin with? Isn't clarity the first priority if you write anything, much less a novel ?
Some things are written to be clear only within the proper context and with the reader's ability to see into them. I remember being blown away at learning the political context of the early modern English literature cannon in college by a really talented and dedicated professor. It was clear from that experience how much otherwise illegal/treasonous critique authors could get away with publishing just by being sufficiently obscure.
On the other hand, I also think there are simply things that aren't well conveyed without relying on advanced techniques, whether the field in question is food, sport, art, etc. There is some value to esoteric works. Naturally, not as many people will appreciate them. This is potentially reflected in the original article: sure, such non-obvious skill-sets can be applied to great effect by certain individuals, but what causes that "creative" application? It's certainly not answered in the original piece, among other dangling questions not really addressed at all.
I'm a developer with an English degree from a liberal arts college and I do agree with the article on this point. When you're trying to dive into difficult literature –and learn how to analyze it in the first place– it's really, really helpful to have a professor leading you through it, and a room full of smart people discussing it. You can't just go fuck off to Bali with Ulysses and get anywhere near the same experience.
Coding is different. The only way to learn how to program is to program. Yeah mentors help a ton and speed things up but I think it's a lot more solitary of a journey.
I did the things you recommend (CS, MBA, 2y traveling) but learned much more running a startup. You really just need experience with autonomy and exposure to smart people.
As a liberal arts major who is now a developer, this article makes me cringe incredibly hard. It's gut wrenching to see such vapid simplifications of both art and science. The author seems to have never really pierced the vale of WHY any particular coding approach was better, it's all 'so these were like musical notes and this person was a pianist so BINGO problem solved'.
I agree. I studied literature in college (coincidentally, my thesis was on Woolf), and am currently working in a technical role at a startup.
I've found incredible value from studying the humanities, especially literature. Some of the courses I took in college completely changed the way I view and understand the world. Literature has been a constant source of inspiration for me, and without doubt has made me a more whole, critical, and creative person--something that has had a marked effect on my career in startups (Caveat: It helps having grown up coding alongside this, I suppose).
With that said, I found the author's examples to be terribly reductive. Studying liberal arts is not going to make you better at finding memory leaks or optimizing algorithms. Exposure to the humanities will, however, make you a more well-rounded human being and help you to contextualize and understand big-picture problems (vision, positioning, identity...the WHY behind the product) from a different (and, of course, not always better!) perspective than might typically be found at a company filled exclusively with STEM graduates. I agree with the headline and the spirit of the article, but it's too bad the author's defense of it doesn't stack up.
As another literature major who now works in a technical role, I can't help but notice that this comment and the one above it are among the best-written in this thread, nor can I forget all of the general panic that went into my nomination anytime that college programming groups had to produce something written along with our code. I smirk somewhat at the idea that Virginia Woolf has much to teach you about clean code. I do, however, think that writing is a very general-purpose cognitive skill, and that exposure to books like Mrs. Dalloway (and their mechanics) are generally good for your brain.
Because stories like this sell to even the lowest audience target: the lazy but dream big ones.
No matter how dumbed-down the tone, for me behind it always lies a figured out person doing smt that is definitely cool from the start.
More than just selling to the lazy ones, it protects itself from being criticised by the competent ones. (You end your concern w an agreeing sentence: the point is valid). (It can do this because it's written by a cool guy sharing cool stuff).
What i take from a story like this is that it's not abt CS, not abt woolf. It's basically: "how to become a perfect painter? Become a perfect person, then paint naturally"
The absolute takedown of the author and the premise of the article followed by a one sentence admission that the idea might have value made me chuckle.
I often try to write code which flows nicely to the eyes. For example, I'll structure single-file Python programs so that they are read bottom to top starting from __main__.
Hmm. It seems that in languages such as C and Python, the bottom-to-top order is encouraged, because functions can't reference other functions that are defined below them. But because that ordering constraint doesn't apply for classes, I find myself going in the other direction for single-file Java programs where a containing class for methods is required.
> It seems that in languages such as C and Python, the bottom-to-top order is encouraged, because functions can't reference other functions that are defined below them.
This is not true for Python.
This is also not true for C if you forward declare the functions!
In Python, I believe function declarations work dynamically, just as variable declarations do. When I'm writing Python scripts, I usually have some code at the global level that calls functions, which must then be above that code. (This is in contrast to a compiled language like C, or JavaScript, which hoists function and var declarations.)
This can be worked around by stuffing everything into a main method and putting if __name__ == '__main__': main() at the bottom of the file (which I usually do anyway). But the mere requirement that you must remember to do so, just as you must remember to forward-declare functions in C, is still an incentive to work from the bottom of the file upwards.
It's a vestige from the time where compilers were working from disk and laying out your program 'declarations first' would speed up the compilation process considerably.
> Our pointer wizard was a philosophy major who had no trouble at all with the idea of a named “thing” being a transient stand-in for some other unseen Thing. For a Plato man, this was mother’s milk.
I don't really see the connection. Pointers are not conceptually difficult, it's an address to a point in memory, but they are none-the-less confusing and notoriously difficult to work with for some.
I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of cross-training, the idea that seemingly unrelated studies can help you directly in a given field. I believe the only way to become proficient in task X is by practicing task X. Even the simplest seemingly transferrable skills have been shown to be independent. I think I remember reading about a study that showed that very strong ping-pong players have no quicker reflexes than non-players in traditional tests (can't find the link). Personal antidotal evidence I found also supports that intelligence or skill in one field rarely transfers over to other fields. I would never take financial advice from a brilliant chess player.
The one thing I will grant the author is that a novice, often unencumbered by traditional methods may come up with novel solutions to tasks.
Personally having learnt 8086 in High School, made job of understanding pointers easy. In my opinion the real hard things in CS are often distributed system/computations/clocks which require a radically different perspective.
It seems to me like a pretty big inductive leap to generalize that no skills whatsoever are transferrable across disciplines from anecdotal evidence and one study indicating the inability of ping pong players to improve their physical reflexes, which likely has a limit based purely on human neural and optimal hardware. At the very least, what about soft skills? Discipline? Attitude? Why else would Google be able to correlate success and college athletics when they released that blog post about revamping their interview process? (Notably, GPA and standardized test scores did not have any similar positive correlation...)
I recently read Fermat's Enigma about Andrew Wiles's successful quest to solve the centuries' old problem of proving Fermat's last theorem. His big breakthrough came from the application of insights from one mathematical field, modular forms, to his own field of elliptic curves. Randy Pausch also talks about "head fakes" in his Last Lecture, which similarly praises the ability to learn skills and lessons that are applicable in a wide variety of contexts, often without realizing that's what's happening.
Of course a certain level of fluency in a subject is required before any cross-disciplinary insights would have any additional return beyond pure study of that subject, so becoming a grandmaster at chess indicates little about you than the fact that you are good at chess. And even after obtaining fluency it may in fact be the case that the ability to apply insights from other disciplines may itself be a trainable skill, not an automatic benefit. There is probably an element of choice in the broadening of the subconscious scan that we undertake while solving problems, as well as the ability to generalize lessons learned into applicable insights and patterns. My own personal theory is that we create and myelinate neural models for patterns that we encounter frequently while solving problems, from which point it may then be possible to recognize some of those problems in other contexts, repurposing some of those neural models that we can access with deep fluency to offload some processing power required in solving problems, in addition to the new neural constructs we must create for each specific type of problem.
You are of course free to believe what you want to believe, but I think this particular instance of skepticism has the potential to hold you back from a wealth of insights. Keep in mind that this New York Times article is clearly written for a general audience rather than a technical audience, so it is understandable that many here would be put off by certain stylistic choices and oversimplifications. But I do think the core premise is a sound one, although I still wouldn't recommend getting a liberal arts education. If you are looking for a more convincing argument, try Todd Henry's book from the Accidental Creative, Bob Rice's book on chess and business or a few episodes of Barbara Oakley's Coursera course.
Yep. And, philosophy's pretty much the playground for having cross-disciplinary insights. It's sad to see that the conventional wisdom is to deemphasize these fields, as if humans ran on nothing but purely rational logic lol.
I once attempted to let the influence of Virginia Woolf guide the way I programmed. After reading The Waves, I therefore decided to create a low-level dialect of Brainfuck with an emphasis on concurrency, a creation which I would use to manage my company's clients.
Eventually I came to the realization that you should make a considerate mental separation between the Waves and the way you program. Literature is full of anti-patterns.
I hate these kind of headlines. There's nothing inherently special in Virginia Woolf when it comes to programming, and her name isn't mentioned anywhere in the article but the headline, so why use her name? And when I start reading the article, realising this is "to be a better programmer, read novels etc." article, I have no desire to go on reading.
As such, I've been a proponent of reading code like text, instead of the usual maintenance method of locating the line with the bug, making the most minimal change and leaving everything else as-is. I believe the more I read the actual program, the better I can understand why was there a bug, get some insight into the original programmer's thinking, and maybe get some more idea on how to better fix the problem.
To be honest, I have no idea what you mean by "read it like text". Your debugging method of
- locate the issue
- understand the entirety of the segment to avoid other pitfalls and understand the issues intended purpose
- minimize changes to avoid creating bigger problems. Rewrite entire segment if necessary (which is why encapsulation is so important)
I dont see how this is reading it like text or what that means to be honest. When I read poetry I read every single line. When I read a novel, I rarely I will glance over dialogue or entire segments because I understand the inteded gist. When I read the news I look for where the fluff ends and read the paragraph to understand what the hell is going on.
If anything I believe we should read more news to be better debuggers. Locate the problem quickly and understand in its entirety. A personal opinion of course
First, broaden the concept of "entirety of the segment". For most it's the immediate scope, or maybe the next level. I'm referring to understanding every element in there, where it comes from, and what it affects, even if you need to look in several other modules for that.
But, the idea is to try and understand why was the code written like that, what is the model the original programmer had in mind, and whether there could be more of the same errors in other places. It's the way you can see a db table and immediately know where will there be issues in the db design.
Yeah, understanding how each peice works is generally a good idea since software tends to be very delicate. I certainly hope a programmer is willing to go deeper and deeper into 3rd party modules until they discover the root of the problem.
When you say it, it sounds complicated, nuanced and elegant. But, from personal experience, it simply relates to mental rules like "make sure your fix doesnt screw up more things" and "if you think a programmer is doing something weird, its probably weird" and "if everything looks fine here, look upstream"
For something like database design, usually there is a restriction of the orm that causes fluff or the programmer is trying to minimize memory usage by reusing variables or something else that can cause utter chaos. Im all for "thinking like the writer", but I feel like that doesnt present actionable steps only to approach it with sympathy. Id argue, get a mental model of minimal necessary steps and see how the other program fits into it or expands upon it.
Everyone is trashing on this; and for the the most part I agree. However, there is a very large value in an English education for programmers.
Learning to write well is learning to communicate effectively. And communication is a core goal of programming. The audience for our code is not the machine, but another developer, or maybe ourselves.
Consider this passage:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.
I open code every day that code benefit from it massively. I suspect you do too.
>Everyone is trashing on this; and for the the most part I agree. However, there is a very large value in an English education for programmers.
>Learning to write well is learning to communicate effectively. And communication is a core goal of programming. The audience for our code is not the machine, but another developer, or maybe ourselves.
Indeed, and clear writing and communication is something that should be taught in K-12 school. You shouldn't have to go to university just to learn to write clearly.
To the extent that you do want to be learning that kind of skill in university, I'm not convinced that universities are very good at teaching it. I'm certainly not convinced that sitting around reading a whole lot of Virginia Woolf is a very good way of getting better at writing clearly, except in the same rather roundabout sense that waxing a car makes you better at karate.
I'm not sure what a program of study actually aimed towards clarity of writing would look like, but I imagine it would avoid the existing academic fetishisation of fiction over non-fiction. Few of us will ever write much fiction, most of us will have to write a lot of non-fiction, and yet our English classes are focused almost entirely on reading and analysing fiction, like a glorified version of tvtropes.
In my experience classes that read literature like that are not to teach you to write better (at least not the direct goal), but maybe to explore the genre or author and write or analyze her.
In my university the writing classes were your usual "this is the theme/subject for the whole semester, I'll give you prompts for you to research and write about".
> I'm certainly not convinced that sitting around reading a whole lot of Virginia Woolf is a very good way of getting better at writing clearly, except in the same rather roundabout sense that waxing a car makes you better at karate.
Ha ha. Love the analogy :). Totally agree. There aspects of creativity and conciseness required for good developers. Its also true that it takes a while for those aspects to sink into a new developers. Its absolutely true that most people outside of the software community don't recognize this, stereotyping software developers as automaton or genius 'hacker types'. For all these reasons I appreciate the article in the nytimes highlighting the creative aspect of software development. But lets not stretch it to Virginia Woolf, and pointers by philosophers. Come on! For some reason that starts reminding me of the rather faux romanticized and pretentious 'Mozart in the Jungle' depiction of musicians stopping in the street to 'hear the music of the city'. Conversely too, I think writers would take serious affront if we asked them to take programming courses in school to prep for a career in, say, journalism or creative writing.
> The technologist’s argument begins with a suspicion that the liberal arts are of dubious academic rigor, suited mostly to dreamers. From there it proceeds to a reminder: Software powers the world, ergo, the only rational education is one built on STEM. Finally, lest he be accused of making a pyre of the canon, the technologist grants that yes, after students have finished their engineering degrees and found jobs, they should pick up a book — history, poetry, whatever.
It seems like he's inventing a straw-man to tear apart. The states pushing this basically want higher salary graduates. That happens to be STEM majors, for the most part, at the moment.
Why not read Rainer Maria Rilke or Charles Bukowski?
“In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write [code]. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write [code]?” -- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Rilke apprenticed with the sculptor Rodin in Paris not learning sculpting as Rilke was a writer and poet, rather he learned how to see the world as an artist.
> At least, so goes the argument in a rising number of states, which have embraced a funding model for higher education that uses tuition “bonuses” to favor hard-skilled degrees like computer science over the humanities.
Jesus Christ. As if we weren't already heading for a glut of underemployed developers in 20 years.
It'll barely affect those of us already in the industry, because we can easily differentiate ourselves from the herd based on our experience. But it'll really put the squeeze on the glut of grads who are competing with each other.
Ultimately, the winners will be big companies, grads with connections, and some grads belonging to biological demographics large companies are actively seeking.
This whole article was poorly reasoned about, but this line in particular makes me cringe:
> To say that more good developers will be produced by swapping the arts for engineering is like saying that to produce great writers, we should double down on sentence diagraming.
In my computer science classes, sure we did algorithmic and mathematical work, but beyond that we had a huge number of creative projects. Many of our assignments were the cs equivalent of what people would find in a creative writing class. The fact that our work is expressed in code does not make it any less creative than writing poetry or drawing.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that even the data structures & algorithms classes are not at all like sentence diagramming. I doubt any writer would say that they became a better or more creative writer as a result of sentence diagramming. Most programmers, on the other hand, I presume would say the opposite about data structures & algorithms.
Diagramming sentences would be most akin to studying basic language syntax. Algorithms and data structures are orders of magnitude more complex. The best comp there might be studying themes, tropes and plot devices in literature - which would be something that makes you a better writer.
My opinion on this opinion piece is that it is complete nonsense. I think that we can all agree that any demanding field of study (including even the fine arts like music, dance, and studio art) provides some benefit. Getting up, going to class, meeting assignment deadlines, working with others, dealing with rejection or failure, all are important life lessons conferred by almost any degree perused seriously. But to somehow equate the value of studying literature with studying the large, challenging, deep and abstract field of study that comprises Computer Science as preparation for software development is simply nonsense.
I know kids in their early teens that write programs, so yes, of course there are some folks that study English Lit and end up with programming jobs. English Lit, however, isn't likely to be the best use of one's time in preparation for a good paying software development job.
I feel compelled to link to If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript https://www.nostarch.com/hemingwayjs. It actually imagines what kind of code Virginia Woolf would actually write. It's a fun and interesting read.
No. You'd be better served by learning a language you do not know. The exposure to different syntactical schemes is what would be most useful in programming.
As software WRITERS we not only string words use sentences - often spoken before in similar ways - but in a way that it becomes our novel.
As software ARCHITECTS we determine the gestalt by selecting foundations, demanding empty spaces and rules which in self similar form are impressed on all aspects of the work.
As software MANAGERS we command am army, we inspire, we maintain discipline and at times we may wage war.
This made me lol :-) As an old Forth programmer and a speaker of Japanese, I have often wondered at the hoops we go through to make our computer languages infix, when it's actually a lot simpler to make them postfix. Having done so, it makes considerable sense to abandon English as the model of computer languages and adopt Japanese. I've often been tempted to do this. Of course it would never be popular, I think ;-)
"I was assigned to a team charged with one of the hairier programs in the system... This program, thousands of lines of code long and growing by the hour".
If 1000 LOC was considered hairy back then, what to say about the modern systems.
Or, you could read something that's actually good? FFS, I had to force myself through Orlando for a lit class, and I burned it afterwards.
If you're going to ram liberal education down people's throats in order to credential them so they are employable, at least stick to the parts of it that are marginally useful, like philosophy, history, and classics, rather than faffing around with shitty modern literature.
No one is denying importance of learning history, literature, etc. What people have begun doubting is if its really worth to spend 200k$ & four years majoring in liberal arts alone, vs. Majoring in Computer Science while taking courses in / reading literature.
This article is equivalent to telling a competitive swimmer, to study calculus since Navier-Stokes equations governing fluid dynamics (and thus water) require understanding of calculus to be solved.
The question worth answering is why quality liberal arts education still has such a high price tag? Especially when the monetary returns are so poor?