C.P. Snow famously lamented in 1959 that our two intellectual cultures — Science and the Humanities — are not merely disconnected from each other, but worse, that each is looked at with derision by the other — even those aspects of each that represent pinnacles of our civilization. As he points out, to the great majority of scientists Charles Dickens is an esoteric taste, whereas few literary scholars literary scholars could tell you anything at all about the laws of thermodynamics.
In particular, these prejudices have affected how computer programming has been perceived in our society through the decades. Many brilliant people have tried, from Alan Kay to Seymour Papert to Mitch Resnick, Mark Guzdial, Amy Bruckman and many others, to help computer programming cross the bridge from the culture of Science to the other side. And yet it hasn’t quite happened.
Well, let’s qualify that: From the point of view of scientists, progress has been impressive indeed. Culturally, computers have become what space travel was to an earlier generation: The next “final frontier”, humanity’s newest gateway to the universe. Many more kids are programming today, there is a greater interest in computation in general among young people, and the entire culture of programming is seen as far more cool than it was a generation ago.
But as far as I can tell, none of this has penetrated very deeply into the culture of the humanities. The closest we get is “digital humanities”, which seems to be seen by mainstream humanities scholars with the same sort of annoyed suspicion that the “Art World” used to reserve for digital art (somewhere, Clement Greenberg is smiling).
My hunch is that if there is going to be a way out of this, it will require a large-scale culture and activity of computer programming that is not at all associated with “Science”. I’m not saying this will be easy, or even possible, but I’m working on it!
Incidentally, I suspect that how you interpret the title of this post may be strongly influenced by which of C.P. Snow’s two cultures you identify with. 🙂