Mastodawn

Excellent article, by Blain Smith (@blainsmith), on the need for a broader education, especially for computer programmers:

https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/

Thanks to Sacha Chua (@sacha) for including this in her most recent weekly Emacs news post.

Edit: proper links for people mentioned.

#Emacs #Unix #C

Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith

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Sacha Chua Mar 17

@ericsfraga @blainsmith I immediately thought of Protesilaos Stavrou as a current example of a philosopher-geek in Emacs, and of the way we have so many writers and teachers and monks and mountain guides and other people of non-CS backgrounds. :)

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éric 🚲 🇪🇺

Mar 17

@sacha @blainsmith Good example indeed.

I'm retired now but all during my research and teaching career, I found that the best programmers were those that had a broader background than just programming and also mathematicians (as maths is really philosophy 😉).

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Michael Piotrowski Mar 17

@ericsfraga @sacha @blainsmith I’d say that many, if not most, of us in #DigitalHumanities (necessarily) have such interdisciplinary backgrounds—but computing is, of course, dominated by increasingly narrow-minded engineering.

I’m going to reflect on computer science as a humanities discipline next week at #UndoneCS…

https://www.undonecs.org/2026/programme.html