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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature."

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.

Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

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I would say that those gifts aren't determined by the content (For you, CS, for others, business or whatever) as they're underlying gifts someone either has naturally and 'easily' or for others still it takes more learning and practice to acquire them. I studied design and now software engineering and I too would say I've acquired these gifts—to an extent—but also not only from university did I learn these but from my parents (We've always had a lot of books and my parents are happy readers) and situational circumstances. :) In that last sentence I was thinking that these things are hopefully taught not only at university but elsewhere and earlier too.

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.

We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect

One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.

The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

There is a difference between writing code and writing prose though. I've met many, many, many programmers who might have been good at their jobs but suck terribly at expressing their ideas during meeting or even in emails. It makes team work very tedious and time consuming.

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