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I studied Classical Philology. I had no idea that learning Ancient Greek and Latin would be amazing preparation for learning to write code. Hey, if you can re

by oalders 13y ago

I studied Classical Philology. I had no idea that learning Ancient Greek and Latin would be amazing preparation for learning to write code. Hey, if you can read some Ancient Greek, you can decipher a lot of [insert computer language here]. It's probably not realistic to see a humanities degree as a meal ticket, but it can be an excellent foundation for the "real world". Getting the degree teaches you to research and to learn. Those are marketable skills you can apply to many jobs. Unless you want a career in academia, in many cases the humanities degrees aren't likely going to lead you to a job in your field of study, but they will prepare you. You just need to figure out where to apply your skills.

agumonkey 13y ago
How is Greek and Latin helping you ? is it to infer meaning through etymology/roots ? or the different grammars ordering ? I never really cared about languages before programming, but after learning it, then logic, semantics, ontology I think about other human languages a lot. I'm curious about your point of view coming from the opposite direction.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  I agree! I'd be fascinated by GP's point of view. :-) Hopefully our posts encourage him to weigh in.
- oalders 13y ago
  For me it was basically learning to take a text in a foreign language and parse it. When you're faced with a different word order and, by extension, a different way of thinking about things, you're forced to take each element of the sentence and break it down as far as you can, in order to understand what's going on. For my second year of University, I studied in Germany (rather than Canada0, which made things really hard for me. To translate my Latin texts I translated from Latin to English and then worked out how to translate the English to German. I had a really great professor who taught us not only how to break down words to find their meanings, but he also made no bones about the fact that the key to translating is knowing when to make a good guess. Once you can get by with Greek and Latin, you can pick up a lot of other bits of languages fairly easily. Sometimes it's by knowing root words. Sometimes it's because you've gotten good at guessing. A lot of those skills apply directly to reading someone else's code and trying to make sense of it. I find that if you can learn to decipher a foreign, natural language, you may just do alright with languages that machines understand.
nikanj 13y ago
I didn't actually major in the arts myself, but I can see many of my old friends suffering. Turns out, knowing ancient greek might help you get a coding job, but knowing data structures, algorithms and some Perl would help a lot more. With the economy in the state that it is, it's a lot harder to beat the odds. Just getting an interview with a not-directly-applicable major seems to be flat out impossible. After many years of watching people dear to me struggle, I'm starting to feel bad telling them that they just need to market themselves better, find a way to bypass the recruitment process and think outside the box. I've come to realize that they really got the raw end of the deal, and instead of any sympathy, they get told that they just need to try harder.
- oalders 13y ago
  Yeah, it's probably a stretch to think that knowing Greek will get you a coding job, but in my case I ended up picking up Perl along the way and I found the two skills to be complementary. Having said that, the team lead at my $work has an M.A. in Music Composition. Having the coding skills will get you the job, but there's nothing to say that a Humanities degree can't prepare you for getting the skills.
arthurcolle 13y ago
The company was Blue Cross Blue Shield (if you care)

by oalders 13y ago

agumonkey 13y ago

How is Greek and Latin helping you ? is it to infer meaning through etymology/roots ? or the different grammars ordering ? I never really cared about languages before programming, but after learning it, then logic, semantics, ontology I think about other human languages a lot. I'm curious about your point of view coming from the opposite direction.

scott_karana 13y ago
I agree! I'd be fascinated by GP's point of view. :-) Hopefully our posts encourage him to weigh in.
oalders 13y ago
For me it was basically learning to take a text in a foreign language and parse it. When you're faced with a different word order and, by extension, a different way of thinking about things, you're forced to take each element of the sentence and break it down as far as you can, in order to understand what's going on. For my second year of University, I studied in Germany (rather than Canada0, which made things really hard for me. To translate my Latin texts I translated from Latin to English and then worked out how to translate the English to German. I had a really great professor who taught us not only how to break down words to find their meanings, but he also made no bones about the fact that the key to translating is knowing when to make a good guess. Once you can get by with Greek and Latin, you can pick up a lot of other bits of languages fairly easily. Sometimes it's by knowing root words. Sometimes it's because you've gotten good at guessing. A lot of those skills apply directly to reading someone else's code and trying to make sense of it. I find that if you can learn to decipher a foreign, natural language, you may just do alright with languages that machines understand.

nikanj 13y ago

I didn't actually major in the arts myself, but I can see many of my old friends suffering. Turns out, knowing ancient greek might help you get a coding job, but knowing data structures, algorithms and some Perl would help a lot more. With the economy in the state that it is, it's a lot harder to beat the odds. Just getting an interview with a not-directly-applicable major seems to be flat out impossible. After many years of watching people dear to me struggle, I'm starting to feel bad telling them that they just need to market themselves better, find a way to bypass the recruitment process and think outside the box. I've come to realize that they really got the raw end of the deal, and instead of any sympathy, they get told that they just need to try harder.

oalders 13y ago
Yeah, it's probably a stretch to think that knowing Greek will get you a coding job, but in my case I ended up picking up Perl along the way and I found the two skills to be complementary. Having said that, the team lead at my $work has an M.A. in Music Composition. Having the coding skills will get you the job, but there's nothing to say that a Humanities degree can't prepare you for getting the skills.

arthurcolle 13y ago

The company was Blue Cross Blue Shield (if you care)