The author advocates that humanities scholars should seek and study programming languages. He believes that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures--rules, models, algorithms--in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education. Students need to become more at ease reading (and writing) back and forth across the boundaries between natural and artificial languages. Computers offer new worlds to explore, and endless vistas in which to see one's own world reflected: the author views such education as essential to cultivating a critically informed citizenry.