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The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride.

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time.

Perhaps of all the humanities, the creative arts come closest to valuing failure. Poets and painters don't expect to get it right the first time. That's the idea of workshopping as a pedagogy, right? Still, there's a real difference. I'd be willing to bet that most creative writers bring a piece of work into a workshop secretly hoping it's a success. Sure, they know they need help on aspects of their story or poem, but that's not the same as failing. A computer program that doesn't run is a failure. A program that produces no usable data about the text it was set up to analyze is a failure. Why don't those failures devastate the developers? Because each time their efforts fail, the developers learn something they can use to get closer to success the next time.