After reading both arguments, I think that both sides do have something to contribute; that being said, I think that Donahue has a better point. While I do think there’s great value in learning code and it can be a genuine boon to those in the digital humanities, I do think there’s more to computers than just code. As Donahue said, “To think of the computer sciences as one “computer science” unified by the language of code makes as much sense as thinking of the humanities as one discipline united by the language of (in the case of the American academy) English.” Computers (and by extension, computer science), are about all parts of a computer. While code is technically how we talk to computers, the computer is many more parts that aren’t necessarily related to how we talk to it.
I don’t think one needs to know how to code to be a student of digital humanities (though I do want to emphasize again how it is a good idea to learn how to code at a basic level), and I do think it may act as a barrier to entry for people who’d otherwise flourish in the field. Coding can be daunting, especially to those who’ve never done it, as it coding can be fragile (as in, one error is enough to screw a LOT of stuff up down the line), and it can also be a bit unituitive, and that’s just with HTML; there are plenty of programming languages out there, some far more user-unfriendly than HTML.
I’ve never really coded at all before; I did some HTML for a tumblr back in the day (for those unaware, Tumblr is a wordpress site so all of the blog pages can be customized to an incredible degree), but beyond that, this was all pretty new to me. I did find it intuitive once I got a grip on what I was doing, but without the guide provided by Dr. Beasely, I’m sure I would’ve struggled immensely; I definitely struggle with how off-putting coding can be initially as I described it above.