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Education Programming

Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission 259

Posted by timothy from the alle-menschen-sind-auslaender dept.
theodp writes On Wednesday, Washington State held a public hearing on House Bill 1445, which proposes a study "to allow two years of computer sciences to count as two years of world languages for the purposes of admission into a four-year institution of higher education." Among the questions posed by the House Higher Education Committee to a UW rep at the hearing was the following: "What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?" The promise of programming jobs, promoted by Microsoft execs and other MS folks like ex-Program Manager Audrey Sniezek (ironically laid off last summer), has prompted Kentucky to ponder a similar measure.
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Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission

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  • BASICally my reply is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Guy From V ( 1453391 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:13PM (#48990051) Homepage

    10 PRINT "WTF"
    20 GOTO 10

    • Re:BASICally my reply is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nathan s ( 719490 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:19PM (#48990115) Homepage

      This. I love coding and languages both, but they aren't even remotely the same. I think learning actual languages does two things that coding doesn't: it gets you to speak to real people (hopefully, if you're doing it right) and it helps you learn a little bit about another culture. Practicing your ability to deal with differences and similarities and maybe even to empathize with other people is a really important life skill that you aren't going to get at all from coding.

      Plus, even from a business perspective, it seems to me that in general people who can talk to people end up making more money than people who only know how to talk to machines.

      • Re:BASICally my reply is... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:28PM (#48990219)
        Hell, my wife told me a story, she was a new undergrad at MIT and the new residents in the dorm were hanging out in the lounge getting to know one another. They got on the topic of foreign languages since there were a lot of kids from other countries or who had traveled fairly extensively, and when one boy was asked how many languages he knew, he replied, "computer, or other?" which drew lambasting from his fellow nerds at arguably one of the nerdiest universities in the world.

        Computer languages are not interpersonal communication languages, and they should not be treated as such. That doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with the foreign language requirements for college admittance (ie, if EVERYONE is supposed to go to college at a given school whether they actually should or not, then foreign language is taught to the lowest-common-denominator and no one learns it well) but treating things that aren't spoken or written human languages as such is stupid.

        • I am myself an MIT grad and I can testify to the fact that foreign language instruction at MIT was every bit as rigorous as CS instruction. That said, MIT did not have a specific admissions requirement for foreign language instruction in secondary school, although it was a distinguishing "plus" in a super-competitive admissions process.

          If a university has a foreign language admissions requirement for a specific reason (as opposed to just something put in place by a non-knowledgeable regulator), then it's ha

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            Learning foreign languages have a tremendous intellectual value too, in my opinion. It is a powerful preparation for wrestling with problems in life, because language dalmost, but not quite, make sense. To master a natural language, you have to open yourself up to it, and you have to delay the reward of understanding and struggle with what *is*.

            Computer languages are *contrived* to make sense. To the degree that a programming language doesn't make sense after a little superficial attention it is just a b

        • Yep..here we go, lowering standards ever MORE in our universities, and in life in general. Redefining what things mean, just to let a few more in under the bar.

          • .here we go, lowering standards ever MORE in our universities

            LOok here feller, evver buddy are a speshul bunkerfly, and desserts there diplomer just as mutch as u do. Kwit beeing an eleetist, u eelitist, u. Kwit triing to put roodblocks in there way, will u? Sumbunny shud call helth n humun servaces on yur ass.

        • Plus merging computer and soft languages will turn programming from a nerd thing into a gay nerd thing. I don't care how much a nerdy 16 year old would tolerate relearning the basics of today's instructional/non-production-ready grade-school programming tool (e.g. BASIC, Java, etc) for an easy A, he's not going to skip French 101 with 75% girls when comp sci 101 is packed with dudes. I know what choice I made back then (French!)
        • Show me a c program that can describe the beauty of yesterday's sunset to someone and i'll show you a printf wrapping some text.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        Empathy and conflict management are things best learned in childhood (despite today's trends towards shielding kids from them). You don't need to study foreign language for that. Do we really need to learn 16 different ways to communicate when it takes so much time out of a curriculum to learn them? If learning languages was as easy as picking up the latest book and spending a few months, then you'd have a point, but unless you're a prodigy, it takes years to master any language enough to not sound like a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by denobug ( 753200 )
          Sorry, your argument still does not convince me that learning foreign is not a good thing. Learning languages are suppose to be difficult and the two years in HS only get someone an intro more than anything else. But honestly, with very little curriculum we are now providing students to learn what else can provide an positive learning experience besides keeping foreign language. It is not like students today will be picking up more rigorous science classes in-liu of the foreign language requirements.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by epyT-R ( 613989 )

            I didn't say it wasn't a good thing. I said it's unnecessary unless you plan to use the skillsets in your career path.

            A proper CS program is heavy on the workload to begin with. What's the point of stuffing those programs with spurious work if most of the students will not use the language after they graduate and pursue work in their given field? They're going to forget 99% of it. If the individual CS student is interested in foreign language, he can take those classes as electives or minor in it. There's n

        • Do we really need to learn 16 different ways to communicate

          I think the number was "three". English and two other languages. Yes, if you're going after a good education to be a participant in the world, you need to know enough about other languages to understand that there are cultural differences embedded in them.

          but unless you're a prodigy, it takes years to master any language enough to not sound like an idiot.

          One does not have to be a fluent speaker to find value in understanding a bit more about the other people on the planet.

          Those of us with other priorities don't have the time.

          If your priority is not to get a good education at a University, then I fear you don't have time to attend one. You should go to a t

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tumalu ( 993708 )

        But realistically, taking two years of a foreign language in high school isn't going to be enough for most people to strike up with conversations people in that language. That's not to say you can't learn a language to fluency in two years - just that you'll need to put in more that a couple of hours per week.

        I agree that coding is very different from learning a foreign language, but I do think that the question in the summary makes a valid point. Why is learning a foreign language so important that we shou

        • I don't think anything you learn in school is really enough to make you truly useful. You take math all the way from K-12 and then in college, and then you get out of school and forget everything except maybe elementary school arithmetic.

          I think the goal is that *some* people who are forced to become minimally competent in any subject in school are going to find they are actually interested in those subjects, and pursue them beyond school and become experts.

          So in that sense I can see the point of forcing e

          • I worked a place where they caught a new hire with pure BS on his resume.

            If you couldn't tell the boss the first derivative of 1/x, HR did checked your lie sheet.

        • Re:BASICally my reply is... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @01:28PM (#48991067) Journal

          Why is learning a foreign language so important that we should dedicate 4 semesters to it (especially when most people don't learn it to the point where it could become directly useful in their daily lives)?

          At the very least, it lets you appreciate the struggle that others face when they speak your language as a second language.

          One of the major goals of education is the development of an appreciation of the condition of others on many levels -- not just social, but cultural, geographical, historical, technological... and linguistic. You won't necessarily become an expert on the differences we all have, but you do learn that we are different, and to appreciate it.

          • Why do you assume the endpoint should be making programmers better understand other people, instead of other people learning how to understand and work with technology?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nbauman ( 624611 )

        Calling computer languages "languages" is a metaphor that was convenient and imaginative at the time somebody first used it. It's like calling mathematics the language of science.

        But they're not languages in the original sense of the term. They don't do all the other things we associate with language. Nobody grows up speaking C. Nobody tries to communicate with somebody in a foreign country using C. Nobody writes poetry in C.

        For the most practical example, it's a big help if you're working in a company and

      • I agree that programming languages are not real languages. There are similarities, which are useful when teaching the subject, but they are definitely different disciplines.

        I'd like to relate an anecdote, here. I majored in CS. I declared a major in Economics as well. However, the College of Liberal Arts (offering Economics) required foreign language, while the College of Natural Sciences (offering CS) did not. I had taken foreign language in high school, but more was required. I ended up dropping Eco

    • 10 PRINT "ce qui la baise" 20 GOTO 10

      There you go. Though while I could write that in at least a half a dozen programming languages, I had to use google for the translation...

  • Not the same thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:14PM (#48990063)
    CS is about rationally mathematically describing a step by step algorithm , foreign language is about getting to communicate with human , foreign cultures, and getting a bit outside your own cocoon. They are not for the same purpose and practically have nothing to do to each others. Making such equivalence make no sense to me.
    • While I don't think that CS should be regarded as a second language. I do think that having some knowledge in CS can help you communicate with other people, and get out of your cocoon/comfort zone a little bit. If everybody I worked with had a decent understanding of how computers worked and some basic programming skills, it would make my life a lot easier.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TWX ( 665546 )
        You're the exception though. For most people, knowing how a computer works doesn't really benefit them very much.
        • While that is certainly true, being able to write code or provide instructions to a computer does enforce a certain way of thinking, which would be beneficial to most people regardless of what they go on to do in life. Personally, I think having young children use something like Scratch to make simple programs is a great way to build problem solving skills, which are far more important that memorizing facts or trivia that aren't going to have much benefit either.
        • ... and that includes CS majors sometimes. I've known developers with bachelor's degrees in CS who had never seen a hard drive, or understood even the fundamental concepts of what goes on in hardware between CPU, RAM, the system bus, attached peripheral devices, etc. What I've noticed in the school I am at now (back-filling formal education for a well-established career in CS) is that there is only one class that teaches those fundamentals, CS1 - and it is not a requirement for the CS degree program. The "c

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by khasim ( 1285 )

      That's not the only thing that doesn't make sense. From the summary:

      "What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?"

      It's NOT "two years". It's ONE HOUR a day (Monday-Friday).

      You can take other classes on those days. INCLUDING CODING CLASSES.

      • You can take other classes on those days. INCLUDING CODING CLASSES.

        This. They're creating an artificial dichotomy as an excuse for dumbing down college admission requirements AND dropping high school electives. In other words, UW is supposed to compete with ITT Tech instead of MIT.

        A college prep curriculum SHOULD be harder than one intended to dump people into the labor pool, and it should cover more than what someone with an entry level job needs to live day-to-day.

    • CS is about a lot of things (algorithms being one important one). Another aspect of CS is the study of computer languages which is actually very similar to linguistics (there is a lot of crossover between the 2 fields). In computer science there is actually a mapping between the power of different kinds of computers and the types of languages they can process.

      Finite State Machines Regular Language

      Pushdown Automaton Context Free Language

      Linear Bounded Automaton Context sensitive Language

      Turing Machine

      • html removed my arrows

        Finite State Machine <--> Regular Language
        Pushdown Automaton <--> Context Free Language
        Linear Bounded Automaton <--> Context sensitive Language
        Turing Machine <--> Recursively Enumerable Language

        Ironically, in a discussion about programming languages, I failed to adhere to gramatically correct html.

    • Another huge benefit to learning a foreign language (as an Americcan) is how much you learn about English in the process.

      Another benefit you don't gain with programming.

  • Assembly the same worldwide (Score:4, Funny)

    by shuz ( 706678 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:16PM (#48990085) Homepage Journal

    Assembler is coded the same in all 196 countries. So the next time you are on holiday just shift some registers to communicate with whomever, wherever you are!

  • I recall back in high school the foreign language options were Spanish, German, and French. In my field German might be the 4th or 5th most spoken language (with English being the first) but Spanish and French might not even crack the top 10. Two years of C++ would have been vastly more useful to me than the two years I wasted learning Spanish (in college I subsequently took C++ and forgot Spanish).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Why did you not take German then?

      • Why did you not take German then?

        Because that was decades ago. While I was quite sure that (Mandarin) Chinese would be more useful than either Spanish or German in my future life, I had no option to take Mandarin and had started Spanish in middle school (where it was literally the only option). Had I known that German would be more useful (than Spanish) to my future I would have switched to that.

        Had I known back then that not only would German be useful than Spanish but also that I am tone-mute, I would have taken German rather than

    • So why'd you take Spanish then?

      I took German. German is the language of many engineers, and a place where there's lots of tech companies. Spanish is the language of kitchen line cooks and janitors and landscapers. There's almost no Spanish-speaking engineers or programmers out there.

      If you're going into a STEM field, the languages you should be looking at are German, Japanese, and Mandarin (not necessarily in that order, it really depends on what sub-field within STEM you're interested in). If your goal

      • ... but if you want to converse with your housekeeper, Spanish would be a good choice. Just sayin.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AtlanticCarbon ( 760109 )

        Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan. The advantage of Spanish (or what people realize less often, French) is that you have large poorer territories in South America and especially Africa where perhaps there'd be more difficulty getting someone with US tech experience to head up an office.

        This is primarily a question of how much we value general education though. People forget the main reason to learn a

        • Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan.

          That's most likely true for German, not so much for Japanese and definitely not for Chinese.

          The advantage of Spanish (or what people realize less often, French) is that you have large poorer territories in South America and especially Africa where perhaps there'd be more difficulty getting someone with US tech experience to head up an office.

          If you're going into STEM

        • Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan.

          Interesting point. IGermany and Japan seem to be able to produce productive and well educated engineers and programmers from their academic systems, even though they spend time teaching a "foreign" language from very early on. Certainly much much more than just classes during two years of their equivalent to US high school. But we can't do it because those two years of one class a term is too much time to spend.

          I've heard say that English is much harder to learn than other languages, yet I've met many Ger

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Learning two years of any spoken language doesn't sound like much.
      Here in Germany I had 9 years of English and 5 years of French.
      I had the option to reduce French to 4 years by switching to Latin.
      I chose to learn 2 years of Spanish on top of that.
      And by the end of high school I had already taught myself C++ for 8 years.

      So don't complain about having to learn a foreign language.

  • Student's needed to take a foreign language course or a computer science course, for the BS Degree. Being that I was a Computer Science Major.... I didn't need to take Foreign Language.

    In hind site, I kinda wish I did. Even though human languages are my worst subjects, and would probably have hurt my GPA, however I wished I was fluent in more languages, so my career isn't stuck in the english speaking world.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      As someone who is really terrible at natural language, I ended up pushing my advisor and taking multiple foreign languages in college and yeah, it really did hurt my GPA and left less time for directly marketable skills. On the other hand I found managers surprisingly understanding when they looked at my transcript and saw which classes had the good grades and which ones I struggled in... and years later now that I am out of the entry level positions hiring managers seem more impressed at the multiple atte

    • I'm bad a foreign languages and took Russian in college. (Same semester I took Quantum Mechanics. College me was a glutton for punishment!) Today, I remember less than five Russian words. The overall experience was decent enough (my required classes ended just as I hit the wall I always hit with human languages), but I'm not sure whether there was any lasting effect on my life.

  • And suddenly Americans are speaking foreign languages! Shall we continue Slashdot in German?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      Only if we re-theme the site to resemble Rammstein album artwork.

    • And suddenly Americans are speaking foreign languages! Shall we continue Slashdot in German?

      Warum nicht?

    • Most U.S. high schools [ncssfl.org] require two years of a foreign language for you to graduate. But the U.S. is big enough that the vast majority of graduates can promptly forget it and live out their lives without ever having to use that foreign language. Quite different from, say, Europe where you can drive a couple hours in any direction and be in a different country with a completely different language.

  • Music for that matter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:22PM (#48990145) Journal

    If they are going to do this for CS they may as well do it for music. Musical notation and I suppose math are the only two notation systems that are consistent in any culture. (I don't particularly agree with the premise of the OP)

    • Not sure on the music, but IIRC about 25 years ago math majors at the University of Florida were exempt from the then-new language requirements.

  • I can honestly say that I've never tried to communicate with other people by verbalizing code. I would have gotten a dirty look at best, from the kids, if I tried saying "for each ClothingItem clothingItem in Laundrybasket ClothingItems, if clothingItem has stains is true, apply prespotter, add clothingItem to WashingMachine."

  • Ironically illogical (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Math isn't a 'foreign language', and you can't speak prolog to get directions or understand a native culture.

  • Forgive me, I had to.
  • CS should not be defined as a foreign language. The college admission requirements should be changed to allow for a foreign language or CS.

    .
    Declaring CS to be a foreign language may have unintended consequences, like mandatory CS subtitles on TV shows and movies.

  • the case (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:27PM (#48990213) Journal

    "What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?"

    Steve Jobs has this one:

    “I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great....None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

    If all you do is write code and never learn to communicate, you're going to end up writing code like Microsoft does [github.com] (seriously, 16,000 lines in a single file? And there are plenty of other lengthy files too, that's not really an anomaly).

  • What next? (Score:3)

    by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <.moc.duolci. .ta. .nosduh.enaj.arabrab.> on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:30PM (#48990243) Journal

    Next up - making 2 years of sitting on the couch playing games equivalent to 2 years of physical education!

    After all, if Reagan can try to classify ketchup as a vegetable [wikipedia.org] ...

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • In my personal opinion, every single person in America should be taught the basics of at least one computer language.

    Just like everyone should be taught the basics of chemistry and the basics of physics.

    Not understanding how to code "Hello World" is equivalent to not knowing that hot things expand.

    As such, computer languages should be a separate requirement in ADDITION to a foreign language, not instead of.

  • If 2 years of CS is actually equivalent to a "World Lanuage" (whetever that is), since I can speak 3 langauges, where do I collect my free (2nd) CS degree?

  • Better to learn Hindi in case Congress is bribed to increase the H1B limit to gajillion. Then you can fake being an H1B, or work in India as a B1H because all their coders would be in the US, creating local demand.

  • There is no equivalence. One is all about logic and mathematics. The other.. language skills and dealing with the illogical, more human stuff. CS is all about strict rules that cannot be broken. Natural human languages are so full of inconsistancies and exceptions the rules barely exist. Learning a foreign language is about learning to wrap your mind around how a different group of people think and perceive the world not how to logically construct an algorithm.

    Substituting one for the other makes about

  • Many decades ago my HS "guidance counselors" told me that I would need two years of a foreign language to get into college. My first effort was Latin, which was the only grade school / high school course that I ever failed. (I'm my defense the teacher only knew two languages and they were Latin and German, he couldn't have passed English any more than I could pass Latin. Many others failed, and some students did pass and even excel, but most of those had previous exposure to another Foreign language earlie

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Don't be bitter. You've learned an important life lesson; don't believe anything an educrat tells you. A lot of people will die under a small mountain of education debt they accumulated prior to learning this.

  • EBNF (Score:2)

    by ruhri ( 1480067 )

    Let me offer an amendment here:

    No language shall be counted towards the foreign language requirement, for which an EBNF does not exist.

    Wow, since when are formal and human languages the same thing? Oh wait, they aren't.

  • Sitting through 3 years of foreign language class was a utter waste of time for me. Would have gladly done double the amount of computer programming, physics, or electronics. (All of which I was also able to take, thankfully.) Three extra STEM classes in lieu of foreign language would be a big boost going into college and/or the job market. Computer Science departments could give a rip whether their students puede hablar español.
    The trick is to make the courses relevant and interesting for the divers

  • What else can you expect from a nation that decided they can legislate pizza into being a vegetable?

  • I'm going to skip over the whole "computer language and spoken language are two different things" argument, and focus on the quote. What's the case for forcing everyone to spend two years learning a foreign language? Is that really a better use of students' time than learning something else?

    Yes. International conflict happens when societies misunderstand each other, and when they're able to dehumanize each other. The more we are able to understand the language and culture of our neighbors, the harder it

  • ...once the machines assume control. Then, machine language will be mandatory.
  • They must be talking about C or ADA. They certainly qualify as foreign languages.

  • do you mean that CS language counts as language? You mean my Chinese and Japanese isn't good enough?

  • (Whips out smartphone and fires up real-time language translator...)

    Man, remember waaaaaay back in 2015 when people were still bitching about educators mandating humans to learn a foreign language the hard way?

    Things change over time. Perhaps so should our educational requirements.

  • For Perl at least I can see their point, but for programming languages? Not so much...

  • Foreign language graduation requirements are a scam to employ PhD and masters students in the linguistics department. I know a lot of about educational psych and language learning and there was little about the intensive foreign language course I had to take at the UW that could be mistaken as for prepping us for actual fluency. These classes are designed to allow students to pass a test, not speak a foreign language. It actually got easier as the summer went on because each grad student got more despera

  • Am I alone in seeing it as an absurd concern for state legislatures to ponder? If the price of having a "state university" is having elected politicians micromanage academic issues, isn't that a little too high?

  • If you think a foreign language isn't useful enough to justify then remove the requirement entirely. Don't just add random crap to the "foreign language" bucket.

    Next up: playing on the school football team to count as a foreign language.

  • I received a business degree at a large state school in 2000.

    A computer language counted as a foreign language in this program. Better yet, statistics counted as a computer language.

    Therefore by just taking your core statistics classes, you covered your foreign language requirement for a business degree.

    I still don't know how I got away with that one.

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