Kieran Healy on his Modern Plain Text Computing class:
To help address these challenges, modern computing platforms provide us with a suite of powerful, modular, specialized tools and techniques. The bad news is that they are not magic; they cannot do our thinking for us. The good news is that they are by now very old and very stable. Most of them are developed in the open. Many are supported by helpful communities. Almost all are available for free. Nearly without exception, they tend to work through the medium of explicit instructions written out in plain text. In other words they work by having you write some “code”, in the broadest sense. People who do research involving structured data of any kind should become familiar with these tools. Lack of familiarly with the basics encourages bad habits and unhealthy attitudes among the informed and uninformed alike, ranging from misplaced impatience to creeping despair.
Man, I’d love to take that class.