[neel_k]

You are reacting to the title, not the actual article.

1. The author is a CS professor who wanted to make a "CS for non-majors" course that non-majors would find actually useful/interesting. So he asked a historian colleague what she wanted her students to know about computers.

2. She replied that she wanted her students to know that (a) databases exist, and if properly designed/indexed can make complex queries very fast, and (b) websites can be automatically populated from the results of DB queries, which makes these search results human-comprehensible.

3. In his CS department, databases and HCI/web design are courses which come late in the sequence, after stuff like algorithms, data structures, and networking.

4. To make (2) accessible without a bunch of pre-reqs, he designed an extension to Scratch/Snap (block-based visual programming languages) which let novices more easily write SQL queries and generate database-backed HTML documents.

5. As a result, he can now teach history majors CS concepts in a way which makes their relevance to historical work directly clear.