I originally had this view of English too, until I took a formal course on criticism in college. Some of the methods are surprisingly quantitative and all of t

I originally had this view of English too, until I took a formal course on criticism in college. Some of the methods are surprisingly quantitative and all of them are procedural. Indeed, many techniques of criticism grew of the the fact that English Professors at universities in the 20th century had no formal method of research, while the counterparts in fields like Chemistry had no problem justifying their existence. I might be more precise in my words above by saying Literary Criticism instead of English. I agree with you that the direct benefit of these disciplines is not entirely clear; must research needs to be done in this area. One thing that is clear, however, is that the undergraduate CS curriculum is not particularly good at teaching this way of thinking. The closest you can come to achieving the effect of English and Philosophy on your thinking is a well designed CS curriculum focused on theory. I've found that the students here who find theory interesting also tend to be good programmers. Again, all of these thoughts are based simply on unscientific observation, but I believe there is a provable, related truth that might come out of them.