Research Computing Services Blog

Why Code?

Someone asked me a while ago why we should learn to code. After all, there are plenty of tools with nice WYSIWYG editors that will give you a fair result while keeping the code all decently hidden. This got me thinking - why do we make anything? As someone who loves making things, it seemed self-evident to me, but it’s precisely when my response is a knee-jerk “because!” that I know I should tease out my reasons. I cook, I craft and I’m starting to code. Why do I think all these things are worth doing when it’s perfectly manageable to go through life without making anything from scratch?

Because it gives you more control

Sometimes, an off-the-shelf product is fine, but sometimes you want to control exactly what’s going into something you consume. If you don’t want a lot of extra sugar or salt in your diet, it makes sense to cook your pasta sauce from scratch, rather than getting it from a jar. Similarly, if you want to style a base-map to show just the features you need, you might have to confront TileMill and learn some CartoCSS. Other times, Google Maps will do the job just fine.

Because it lets you customise and make alterations

It has happened that I’ve fallen in love with a dress that didn’t fit quite right. Having some basic dressmaking skills means that I can judge whether it will be easy to alter it to fit then make some adjustments. In the same way, being confident to try out some basic code means that you can often alter the default settings to something that works better for you. Want those images centred on your blog? It’s easy enough to edit the html.

Because it lets you understand what you’re getting

When I learned crochet, there was a woman at the workshop who has a business selling handcrafts. She didn’t really want to do much crochet herself, but wanted to understand better the process of making the items she sold, so she could assess the quality and appreciate the time and labour that goes into a beautiful, one-off piece. Understanding a bit about the diverse skills and amount of labour that goes into creating anything helps you to assess the quality and decide if the price really reflects the value.

Because it refines your bullsh*t detector

Following on from the last point, knowing a bit about how something is made and being able to assess the quality of the materials will help you judge whether you’re really getting what is claimed. If the label says that dress is vintage but you can see it’s got a modern zipper and finishing techniques, ask a few more questions before you hand over any cash. In this vein, I was interested to see critics of the FaceBook ‘sentiment manipulation’ experiment arguing that the sentiment analysis tool used was not suited to short texts like FaceBook posts. Having a sense of how things work helps you to ask better questions and makes you more likely to pick up when something’s not quite right.

Metal zip and open seams? This dress is probably from the early 1950s

Because it lets you contribute usefully to the conversation

I Tweeted about this exchange I’d had, and one of my clever geeky friends responded like this:

@FCTweedie Yepyepyep. Not asking to build the next major revolutionary infrastructural changes - just have an understanding of how it works
— datakid23 (@datakid23)
June 21, 2014

@FCTweedie In ways, we IT types need the digital humanities to come to us to help with our content, copy, aesthetics, history, politics
— datakid23 (@datakid23)
June 21, 2014

In the context of digital humanities, this is so important. We Humanities types need to be tech-literate enough to be confident to ask questions. To ask why something is done in a particular why, to ask how it works, to ask what would happen if something were done differently but also to bring our knowledge of history and politics and philosophy and ethics to the conversation. Wearable tech, for instance, talks a lot about the ‘quantified self’, but we’ve been talking about the nature of the self for a while over in the Humanities. Don’t you think we should be adding some of that nuance to the conversation? Just what do we mean when we talk about measuring the ‘self’? And are the metrics offered by devices such as JawBone or FitBit always useful or appropriate or could they actually harm some users?

Not to mention that as people who (by and large) love words and understand the importance of stories, our participation is crucial for turning a clever hack into a compelling one.

Because it’s satisfying

Because, whether it’s finally mastering cable knitting or undertaking analysis of politicians’ maiden speeches to parliament, there’s something pretty satisfying in making something yourself (hey, I even like assembling Ikea furniture). You don’t have to make everything from scratch, you may never build something that changes the world, but sometimes it’s fun just to get in there and make something.