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Programming Government United States

Computer Coding Could Count For Foreign Language Credit Under Bill (mercurynews.com) 144

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Instead of learning a foreign language, Michigan students could take computer coding classes to replace the high school graduation requirement, under a bill that passed the state House Tuesday. Currently, the Michigan Merit Curriculum, which dictates the state's academic standards for graduation, requires students to take two world language credits to receive a high school diploma. Before the bill passed a vote, bill sponsor Rep. Greg VanWoerkom spoke about the value of coding in Michigan's prominent auto and tech industries, as well as it being a good alternative for those kids who struggle with traditional language classes.

"Besides being a hard skill, that employers actually want, coding. helps build soft skills. Coding promotes the use of logic, reasoning, problem solving and creativity," the Norton Shores Republican said. "Any professional coder will tell you that to be fluent in coding takes years of practice and a deep understanding of the language." In opposition to the bill, Rep Padma Kuppa said though she understands the importance of adding more technology education to curriculums, having had a career as a mechanical engineer, coding is not a foreign language. Students need both computer and tech skills and foreign language skills. "As technology helps the world become more interconnected, our ability to understand and work with others on technical projects around the globe is not only related to the ability to code, but to understand one another," the Troy Democrat said.

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Computer Coding Could Count For Foreign Language Credit Under Bill

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  • Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @07:22PM (#61405472)

    As having both learned a foreign language and multiple programming languages, programming in some respect actually feels a bit like a foreign language, even though in truth it's based on English. There comes a point where you have an intuitive sense of being able to describe what it is you want the computer to do, though I would only count systems level languages (i.e. Rust or C) as being sufficient as they require you to think more about the underlying mechanisms, kind of like how foreign languages make you think more about the underlying structure of language itself.

    • Because it's not (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @07:24PM (#61405476)
      the two skills have completely different utilities in life.

      Programming is math and/or instructions. Language is communication. There's a wide gulf between the two.

      This is just tech companies trying to drive down wages. Computer programmers are some of the few who are still paid OK with decent benefits. That cannot stand.
      • This is just tech companies trying to drive down wages.

        ... or it's idiot politicians being idiot politicians. They'd like to help prepare America to compete---they just have a poor understanding of what's needed for that to happen.

        But I agree that these skills are completely different and legislation like is a terrible idea. At least there's some opposition that has an understanding of the problem.

        • How do other countries prepare students to compete? They require them to be fluent in English. How do we do this in America? We tell the students that foreign languages are dumb and that if we just wait long enough that everyone will speak English eventually anyway. It's the "why try harder?" approach.

          • Huh? Who's telling students that foreign languages are dumb? Other students don't count, they're just mad they have to do homework.
      • Also, a computer language only has ~30 vocabulary words. A human language has a bountifully high number of words. And is ultimately more expressive.

        • Which language has only 30 functions or procedures?
          • Wouldn't a function or procedure be more akin to something like an allusion or reference in natural language; something that is composed of a bunch(sometimes a whole bunch) of words, but is designed to be called up much more compactly because it gets too much repeated use to make bothering with the full text worth it?

            That said, I imagine that the idea that a function is like a word might be more plausible in languages (German is always the first example that leaps to mind, there are a bunch of others) wh
            • something like an allusion or reference in natural language; something that is composed of a bunch(sometimes a whole bunch) of words, but is designed to be called up much more compactly because it gets too much repeated use to make bothering with the full text worth it?

              We call these things "nouns" and "verbs" - open word classes (you can make up new ones, just like you can define new records, structures, classes, functions, or procedures in a formal language) for complicated concepts (like the word "automobile" for a very particular machine with a chassis, four wheels, an engine, an arrangement of seats etc etc.). No language has just *thirty* of these. You use *thousands* of them in any language, be it natural or formal.

      • OK, linguistics perspective: Programming 'languages' & human languages couldn't be more different. Whether you read Chomsky or Tomasello, it's clear that languages do far more than give instructions or convey information. In fact, the vast majority of human language use is for managing interpersonal relationships. The informational part of human discourse is rather minimal & often redundant, e.g. a manager demanding particular info in a particular format at a particular time to satisfy his ego. Thin
    • Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @08:31PM (#61405602)

      From the counter-point: Why? The purpose of a foreign language requirement has two parts - first, learn another language so that you can talk to other people (real people not computer ai sims) from other countries; and second, it is a very long and very laborious process which forces you to train your brain. Whereas computer languages are DAMN SIMPLE! Even the most complex computer language is simpler than Esperanto, the simplest spoken language. You can learn to program in one semester in college, or much faster on your own, whereas 4 years of a natural language in college leaves you able to speak it badly but still need many years to be fluent. And four years of high school language leaves you barely able to speak the language as a tourist, where as four years of programming (without computer science) and you can do well.

      Allowing a computer language as a substitute for a foreign language is essentially dumbing down the curriculum! This is not much better than telling the guys on the football scholarships that figuring how to keep score will qualify for the mathematics requirement. What happened to the days when college was an instittute of higher learning, not just four more years of baby sitting or four years of technical trade school? If you just want to learn how to program, then go do a damned trade school where you learn one thing only and can leave and get a job without actually getting an education. America is already dumb enough, let's not try and see if we can get any lower.

      • Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday May 21, 2021 @01:25AM (#61406222) Journal

        Learning a foreign language helps you realize that foreigners are also people. We need more of that in the world.

      • From the counter-point: Why? The purpose of a foreign language requirement has two parts - first, learn another language so that you can talk to other people (real people not computer ai sims) from other countries;

        But chances are, you'll never need to use a foreign language on the job. Ever. In fact, the higher my pay grade has gone, the less relevant it ends up being to my life.

        Meanwhile, programming languages truly are applicable to any job you can imagine.

        and second, it is a very long and very laborious process which forces you to train your brain. Whereas computer languages are DAMN SIMPLE! Even the most complex computer language is simpler than Esperanto, the simplest spoken language. You can learn to program in one semester in college, or much faster on your own, whereas 4 years of a natural language in college leaves you able to speak it badly but still need many years to be fluent. And four years of high school language leaves you barely able to speak the language as a tourist, where as four years of programming (without computer science) and you can do well.

        That really depends on which foreign language you're talking about; some are grammatically more similar to English than others, and some of them will have more cognates than others. Some (like say West Frisian) will require very little work to understand, and som

        • Education in the broader sense is much more than, and also more important than, job training, and there are tremendously valuable reasons for learning languages other than "will use on the job."

          In most jobs you are very unlikely to use Latin on the job; yet, it is still taught. For many reasons, including but not limited to:

          * It is the language of many of the works of classical antiquity, many of which remain extremely relevant to our own culture and times.

          * It is the more or less direct ancestor of French

      • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        You can learn to program in one semester in college, or much faster on your own, whereas 4 years of a natural language in college leaves you able to speak it badly but still need many years to be fluent. And four years of high school language leaves you barely able to speak the language as a tourist, where as four years of programming (without computer science) and you can do well.

        In other words, studying a foreign language is not very useful. Why force everyone to do it then?

        If you want kids to learn about foreign culture, then teach foreign culture in English. You can cover a lot more than one region in 4 years if you remove the need to learn a whole new language while doing it.

        What happened to the days when college was an instittute of higher learning, not just four more years of baby sitting or four years of technical trade school?

        I'm pretty sure the article's talking about high school.

    • Very true. Programming helps me to learn and understand foreign languages not only in a conversational sense, but also in their grammatical functions. Nevertheless, as many others have said, programming and foreign languages have very different roles in society. While I think we should credit people well for learning to program--and perhaps encourage students of foreign language to take introductory programming--I think it's a bad idea to simply consider them equal. In fact, Americans desperately need to le
  • In 1978 I went to a college where a computer programming course fulfilled a foreign language requirement.

    • DeVry?

    • by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @11:52PM (#61406062) Journal

      In 1978 I went to a college where a computer programming course fulfilled a foreign language requirement.

      Speaking of Michigan... In the sixties, at the University of Michigan, I transferred from the computer specialization of the electrical engineering degree program (in the Engineering school) to the computer science degree program (in the Math department of the school of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LS&A).

      This meant I had to pass a language course to get the degree. Oops!

      I asked hopefully if they'd accept a computer language for the requirement. Nope. Had to be a natural language, as part of the intent was to also teach about another culture, helping to make the student "well rounded".

      (i.e. not pointed in any direction).

  • Word Thinking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2021 @07:34PM (#61405496) Homepage Journal

    These people are confused because the word 'language' is overloaded.

    "Word-thinking" is common among monolingual individuals. Learning additional human languages teaches the student how to think a
    in a superset of his native language.

    Free Software -> Software Libre? Software Gratis?

    Computer programming teaches you how to think methodically which is another critical skill. Stacking programming languages helps, again, develop superset thinking in this domain.

    Computer languages are also vastly smaller, regular, quite limited, and thus easier. I can get around in about thirty computer languages, but only five natural languages. And lest anybody think they're equivalent, they can try their hand at natural language processing.

    • Computers communicate in binary. People communicate in philosophy.

    • Can you fill out your tax forms? Congratulations, you fullfill our college's mathematics requirement! Can you read that last sentence? Congratulations, you are now prepared for a life wondering why all the good grunt jobs are going overseas.

    • From personal experience, I fully agree. I have made four sincere, methodical, more than one year long efforts to learn foreign languages without any success. The words just don't stick with me despite having a massive American vocabulary. Yet, I learned my first computer language at the age of 15 in 1980 in a few months and, after having learned over 100 can now pick one up in days. I've also written compilers and dabbled in natural language processing. The two are fundamentally different.
      • Learning a new language after childhood takes quite a few years actually. Teaching kids foreign languages in high school is actually part of the problem. Foreign language education should begin in the very earliest years.

        Then you could teach them coding in HS instead of foreign language!

        • Research into foreign & second language acquisition has shown this not to be the case, e.g. 2 groups of children in Hong Kong start learning English. 1 group at age 5, the other at age 10. Their proficiency was tested at age 15. This means that group 1 spent twice the number of years studying English. Results showed no discernable differences in language proficiency except that those who started earlier tended to have slightly less noticeable Chinese accents. This isn't surprising when you consider that
  • Not the same (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vix86 ( 592763 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @07:39PM (#61405510)

    Don't get me wrong; coding is a great skill. It can help people to learn logical thinking and how to break problems down into steps to solve sometimes complicated looking problems. But coding is not a replacement for foreign language working.

    I've been out of high school for over a decade now and I've had plenty of time to reflect on the required 2 classes of French I had to take. I forgot nearly all that I learned and instead replaced it with Japanese in college but learning French (or any foreign language) did expand my horizon in some ways. In particular, I learned what conjugating is -- sure a class lesson in English probably could have taught me this but it didn't click with me until I started doing it in French. I also learned that our languages, English in particular, are very pragmatic [wikipedia.org]. Things like idioms don't make any sense when translated literally and there is often a lot of meta-sensitive information included in the words and phrases we use (ie: I don't have a concrete example, but there are many words with near identical meanings but you would choose one over the other because the other word has a negative sentiment usually attached to it). Also learning that many languages can toss out a lot of information (ie: the subject of a sentence) and rely on the listener to fill in context was kind of eye opening -- I didn't experience this till Japanese, but I've heard Spanish does it too.

    Some of these things I learned over my many years of learning Japanese, but other people could pick up a few of these things in their language classes. Will a programming language teach/show you any of this? No, absolutely not. Is it important to discover these kind of things in the grand scheme of things? Probably not, but it has definitely made me more sympathetic towards non-native English speakers when they struggle with our mongrel-bastard of a language.

    I know there is a philosophy of thought held by some educators, where school isn't meant to be 100% a "jobs training" program but is also meant to expand/expose students to new ideas and build better and more rounded people. For most Americans, being made to learn a second language checks that box.

    Personally, I know my high school self would have preferred to have dropedp the second language since I was already learning Japanese on the side and was taking "Computer Programming" classes as well. I do find it tiring though that school districts are still trying to treat coding as if its something you need to know or you'll fail in life. They'd be better served requiring 1-2 classes of some job skill like carpentry, car mechanics, welding, plumping, electrical, etc; since most people aren't ever exposed to the possibility of going into blue collar work.

    • by dshk ( 838175 )
      The bill doesn't say that coding is a replacement of foreign language. It says that you have to do something in the school anyway, and until now you had no choice, you have to learn a foreign language, now you can choose to learn a programming language. And yes, maybe you should be allowed to choose carpentry instead of learning a programming language.
      • Maybe learn a programming language AND French AND carpentry?

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          Nothing wrong with spending your entire life learning various things of little to no practical use. Quite a lot wrong with demanding all that in high school.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MacMann ( 7518492 )

        Someone that is going on to university to learn computer science or software engineering would be better served in learning a foreign language in high school. Where I went to university the computer science and software engineering programs were both accredited by some place or another. To get that stamp of approval for the course plans all students had to know a foreign language. Learning programming with a high school level of math is nearly worthless. It' might help in some familiarity with a command

    • We're currently in a dumbing down phase in American culture. We no longer strive to create great citizens for the future. Instead it's all about can they get that entry job easily, and can they hold that entry level job until they retire? As for Civics classes, we teach them to vote for the orange guy and that the black book with the cross on it has all the other answers they'll need, so why waste time on other things? Look, only elitists are smart, and we don't want our kids to group up to be elitists

    • Where is the evidence that learning to write code causes math, logic, & critical thinking learning? Yes, coding requires these but I've yet to see any research showing this causal relationship. If anything, what I've seen suggests that math, logic, & critical thinking contribute to coding, not vice versa.
      • I would not be surprised if learning computer programming helps with math and logic for *some* people. I would be more surprised if it helped anyone with critical thinking. And I would be astounded if it helped most people in any of these domains.

        FWIW, plane geometry caused a revolution in the way I thought--for the first time I realized that all opinions and thoughts could only be securely based on axioms, and the axioms were harder to justify--they were assumptions, although they could be based on evide

        • I would not be surprised if learning computer programming helps with math and logic for *some* people. I would be more surprised if it helped anyone with critical thinking. And I would be astounded if it helped most people in any of these domains.

          FWIW, plane geometry caused a revolution in the way I thought--for the first time I realized that all opinions and thoughts could only be securely based on axioms, and the axioms were harder to justify--they were assumptions, although they could be based on evidence. I don't think geometry does that for most people, though.

          No, it doesn't.

  • My company decided to patent some work I had done. When the lawyer came back with the paperwork describing my "invention" I could hardly recognize it. Forget invention, or even my invention, it did not even resemble any English I knew. And I was raised on the diet of 19th century grammar book Wren and Martin [eg4.nic.in] . I think legalese or bureaucratese can be given foreign language status.

    BTW is it at all possible to clean up the law some sort of pseudo code like language to clearly define the scope of operators like or/and and their arguments they apply over ...

    • My company decided to patent some work I had done. When the lawyer came back with the paperwork describing my "invention" I could hardly recognize it.

      Happened to me, too. Nevertheless we applied for twelve where I was inventor or co-inventor and got eight of 'em. ... it did not even resemble any English I knew. And I was raised on the diet of 19th century grammar book Wren and Martin

      Leagalese is all about "What did the word mean when they passed the law?" and "What did the word mean when a decision in a pre

      • A little of it is foreign. But most of it is just archaic, from a long sampling of history.

        Legalese, that is. Bureaucratese is a technical dialect (incorporating some legalese), full of subject-specific well-defined terms, just as many other fields (engineering, medicine, ...) have. The terms are often distinct from the equivalent in the common dialects to flag that they have the special, or at least carefully defined field-specific, meaning.

        You'll notice that the grammars and constructions are pretty muc

    • I once found a deed to my parent's house drawn up in 1976. Understanding it relied more on having read Shakespeare, given the archaic word choices. Later on, in the decade, there was a bill passed (in NY) to force legal documents to be written in common English understandable by an 8th grader. Don't know how much that affect things even in deeds. The first point that came to mind was that lawyers create work for other lawyers and to make sure that need them to double check everything that you do.
      I visi
  • Not the same (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 )

    Computer languages are all English.

    Americans will do anything to avoid learning a foreign language.

    • If we wait long enough, everyone will speak our language! This worked out great for the Latin, there are Latin people everywhere!

    • Feel free to learn how wrong your statement was, starting with Perligata.
    • That's not really fair though. Some students will do anything to get out of doing more schoolwork. Foreign languages = schoolwork.
  • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @08:42PM (#61405626)

    Computer languages do teach logic and reasoning. Computer languages can even teach us something about human languages, like how someone should use and interpret certain logical constructs in a sentence. Knowing a different human language, especially one with some shared history, can teach you things about your own language. It can help interpret "borrowed words" in your own language.

    One thing a foreign language can teach someone is that gender is not sex. Gender is a linguistic construct to inform the speaker/reader something about a person or item. Sex is an immutable characteristic of a person or animal. One can learn that using they/them for a single person is nonsense. Words mean things and "they" implies multiple people. There is no word "Latinx", that is putting an English construct of gender onto another language. Spanish uses "Latino" for the masculine or neuter gender, and "Latina" for the feminine gender. Are we supposed to impose English standards onto foreign peoples? Isn't that just colonialism all over again?

    People can learn that place names came from somewhere. "Arizona" means a dry place. "Colorado" is a colorful place. Cities all over the USA have names from Spanish and French and that can inform people on our own history. Learning a foreign language means learning foreign literature, history, and culture. Foreign places won't seem so foreign, and by learning how other cultures act it can show us something about our our culture by the comparison. Things like how they/them for a single person is nonsense.

    Does learning a computer language teach such things? No. Maybe that's why educators might prefer students learn to code than get some insight on history, culture, and literature. It's easier to teach children more nonsense if they don't have a wider view of humanity and history.

    • One thing a foreign language can teach someone is that gender is not sex. Gender is a linguistic construct to inform the speaker/reader something about a person or item. Sex is an immutable characteristic of a person or animal. One can learn that using they/them for a single person is nonsense. Words mean things and "they" implies multiple people. There is no word "Latinx", that is putting an English construct of gender onto another language. Spanish uses "Latino" for the masculine or neuter gender, and "Latina" for the feminine gender. Are we supposed to impose English standards onto foreign peoples? Isn't that just colonialism all over again?

      I really don't know which thing you just wrote is dumber, that learning a

      • a foreign language teaches you anything about immutable characteristics other than everything is a matter of perspective because words don't always directly translate, duh, or that "latinx" is somehow an English construct, because we have a monopoly on creative misspellings, or the other dumb shit you said, which I've already forgot.

        • What do you mean "somehow"? The term was invented a couple of years ago by radical Marxist academics in the US. Native speakers of American English who decided the basic grammar of another language was unsuited to their political preferences and who seek to impose their own perverse values upon that language by inventing a new word and jamming it down everyone's throats. It is not just an "English construct", it is a particularly American political construct imposed upon a foreign language for non-lingui
    • One thing a foreign language can teach someone is that gender is not sex.

      I speak Spanish fluently and I sure didn't learn that from Spanish. "Gender" in linguistics is a different concept than gender of people.

      • Gender is a linguistic term, sex is a biological term. People confuse the two because both use male/masculine and female/feminine.

        Males are most often masculine, and that's where the idea of gender and sex became equated with each other. The same goes for female and feminine. A female can be womanly, indicating one has shown feminine qualities, and generally those of an adult female or a "woman". A male cannot be womanly because a male cannot become a woman. A male can be womanish, acting feminine and

        • A car might have "masculine lines and features" but not male ones, because a car is inanimate. A piece of furniture may have "feminine color and scent" but not female ones, because furniture is inanimate. Gender gets confuse with sex in the English language often

          In Spanish, a piece of furniture can be at the same time "un asiento" which is masculine and "una silla" which is feminine. Or sometimes you just say "el aguila" even though the word "aguila" is feminine, just because it rolls of the tongue better to use 'el'

          • And don't tell him that in German, the word for "girl" is neuter (neither masculine nor feminine).

    • Things like how they/them for a single person is nonsense.

      What I can't get off my mind is what level of education does a person need to be stuck at to think a thing like this. Less than eight grade right? Eight grade, but lots of alcohol consumption?

      You're talking to strangers on the internet and you can't figure out singular they, huh? I noticed you used person instead of man or woman, is that because it's easier to type? If a man or woman got your gender wrong, would you correct him or her, or do you let him or her slide because he or she doesn't know your i

      • Words mean things. If we can't agree on what words mean then we are in a Tower of Babel.

        • by jbengt ( 874751 )

          Words mean things. If we can't agree on what words mean then we are in a Tower of Babel.

          I agree in principal, but the gender-agnostic singular "they" has been used for centuries. Outside of misguided grammar pedants, it's a perfectly fine word to use that way. I use it all the time with no problems, especially as a pronoun for collective nouns and proper names, e.g. when referring to companies and contractors.

        • The tower of babel was being built by people who all spoke the same language though.

      • I think by the 8th grade an English speaking student should be well aware that they and them are 3rd person plural pronouns.

        Up until fifty or sixty years ago, American English was like most languages that inflect pronouns for gender, in that the masculine was used as the default when sex was unknown or you were talking about a mixed-sex group. Then some angry, Marxist misandrists took a que from Orwell and started attacking our shared language for their own political benefit, and for some damn fool reas

  • by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @09:28PM (#61405724) Homepage

    Ketchup is a vegetable and reading circuit diagrams is the same as learning Shakespeare.

  • by Don Bright ( 6770394 ) on Thursday May 20, 2021 @09:51PM (#61405806)

    thats like saying you should learn enough french to write an instruction manual and then you "know french".

    its like saying that "english class" is only for learning enough english to write the instructions on how to repair a refrigerator.

    when you study a human language, properly, you are also studying culture, history, linguistics, grammar, social interaction, psychology, geography, and many other things - you will pick these things up even if you are just trying to learn a pop song. learning that some other country has 5 levels of formality and you cannot mess them up - that is a profound experience and teaches you something about humanity. learning that some languages have multiple genders or different concepts of time. that is learning a language. the final level of human language study is to study the human condition itself through a different world view than the one you grew up in.

    when you "study" a computer language, you are usually studying syntax and basic scientific method (does this work, why not, will this work, why not, repeat ad infinitum), mmmaybe you study organization like with object oriented programming - which of course is being replaced in many domains by lesser-obect languages like Go. because most computer languages are basically the same. there is no 'computer condition' that you learn about after years of comprehending the powerpc processor altivec instructions or whatever. if you go on rosetta code and look up an algorithm , no one implementation is radically different from another. they don't even use different character sets - almost everyone is still using a base of ascii.

    there might be an art to being an expert in a specific computer language, like the obfuscated c contest or code golfing, but even that is much closer to something like drawing, painting, music, or sculpture (actually probably closest to kinetic sculpture) than it is to human language study. but none of those should count as foreign language study - and they don't.

    designing a user interface - now you are getting closer to the same ballpark. but not really.

  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:21PM (#61405862)

    Education had a different meaning in the Greco-Roman days and the Renaissance. Higher learning was aimed at literature, philosophy, language, the arts, and the beginnings of science including medicine, astronomy, physics, etc. Every educated person was familiar with several languages and understood the economic and political situation in nearby countries. Shakespere's work shows that even common people had a general awareness of the world.

    Today, education means job training. No philosophy, art, music, or deep exploration into economics, geography (how many high school grads can find their location on a map or name their local/national representatives?), etc. We exist to serve the corporate overlords.

    One might say that there is no need to understand a language other than English in the time of the internet. Others might say that such ignorance imposes a cultural poverty. Music, for instance, not only embiggens the soul but it greatly improves your proficiency with mathematics and logic. An education without music, the arts, history, social understanding ... is severely lacking.

    • Today, education means job training. No philosophy, art, music, or deep exploration into economics, geography We exist to serve the corporate overlords.

      That is really sad.

    • No philosophy, art, music, or deep exploration into economics, geography (how many high school grads can find their location on a map or name their local/national representatives?), etc.

      Technology has shaped us. From GPS and Maps answering the "where am I" to an always on answering machine called Google search, and even calculators alleviating the need to count on our fingers and toes, as well as word processors that count our words, and correct our spelling and grammar.

      Far as learning a language there's several benefits. It opens one up to literature and ideas not in our own society. That scientific paper only published in Chinese, or ideas expressed in other languages that have no counte

  • Michigan is about six years behind Kentucky https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
  • The joke "what do you call someone who only knows one language" "an American" should be a point of shame. We have several states bordering a Spanish speaking country, two bordering a French speaking province, but most importantly within the US itself is an entire territory with 3M+ Spanish speakers. I've half-assedly "learned" both in US schools and can at least read signs and follow simple directions given in both languages. "Learn to code" is not even remotely an appropriate substitution.

    • People who live in a region where multiple languages are known but they only know one can have causes rooted in segregation and discrimination. In the early 1600s the English banned Gaelic in an attempt to erase the language along with the culture associated with them. Linguistic genocide is very real, and can have terrifying effects on our knowledge of history, and as you have proven the perception of others unto others.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/mu... [bbc.co.uk]
      https://www.optilingo.com/blog... [optilingo.com]

  • The main arg is for i && count as 1 variable without exception.

    Hmmm somehow I don't see this being useful for communicating with humans.

  • The biggest surprise from this post was to learn that Americans were required to learn foreign languages...

    Joking aside, computer languages are (supposed to be) a very strict and unambiguous notation to tell a computer exactly what to do, while human languages are full of ambiguity and nuances - which just quite well in everyday life to express the fullness of the human experience with a limited set of symbols - let alone poetry.

    I have used at least 3 languages regularly while growing up, and now work in

    • * which just quite well = which works quite well
      * And there's a fourth language = And there's a 5th language
      * etc.

      I see from another article even the little alcohol I drank might have damaged my brain.

  • I remember when I was stuck in a Guanajuato dive and stumbled across another programmer, our only common language being Perl. Sure was handy being able to ask him "donde es el baño" using those regexes and interpolation.
  • A lot of colleges have done this. The idea of a language requirement isn't to just have a language requirement, it's to be able to understand literature written by humans in another language. That's not code. In fact, code is incredibly hard to understand if it has no comments and meaningless names, which is equivalent to comments and names in a foreign natural language that you don't understand. The only purpose of this is to graduate more idiots.

  • The fact that this has to be said, demonstrates who stupid people are the devolving nature of education.

    But hey, if you fluent in FORTRAN, I guess you'll be able to pick up French really easy. Moron.
  • Not at all the same thing, says the person who just barely graduated high school French.

  • How about letting students play Starcraft instead of attending physical education class because it's Esports.

  • Speaking as a linguist (in the sense of someone who has done both theoretical linguistics and field work), and as someone who has learned (and sadly, mostly forgotten) several foreign languages, and as someone who has programmed in computer languages including FORTRAN, Pascal, LISP, Prolog, and Python (and dabbled in others), no: computer languages and natural languages share almost no characteristics. They both have words, true, but programming languages have a few words with no inflectional or derivation

  • Ah, I remember how flat and uninspiring that old FORTRAN poetry was when translated into English. It just didn't hold up.
    And the hours and hours of bashing my head against the desk trying to find the right metaphors in C and PHP, finally giving up and just stating the facts in plain text.
    You don't really know a language until you can translate the jokes.
    I guess that's why I was such a shitty poet and novelist in spite of being a top-notch programmer. Yes, I could spend hours and hours reading reams of code.

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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