[dimal]

I agree. I was an English major. Luckily, I had one teacher who taught us how to really read the base text and extract as much meaning from that as you could, without extrapolating at all. It turned out that there was an enormous amount of information that was latent in every text, once you knew how to analyze it. By this, I mean, from little details you could learn different characteristics of the narrator or setting, etc. Sentences that seemed like they were simply nice sentences actually were conveying very specific information that you could use to create a more vivid and accurate picture of the world that the text was creating.

I think this has turned out to be an incredibly useful skill for me, much more than any algorithm I’ve learned. I learned out to read deeply and consider my words very carefully when I write. Programmers are not really engineers. What we do is applied logic, yes, but ultimately we’re writers, and we’re readers. We write code and documentation, and we read code and documentation. Most programmers don’t consider their audience when they write. They just write for the computer. But the most important audience of your code is your team, who has to read it. I wish most engineers had the English class I did. I think it would help them immensely.