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Is Computer Code a Foreign Language?
Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, is being considered in Congress.
The animating idea behind these bills is that computer coding has become a valuable skill. This is certainly true. But the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided: It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.
As a professor of languages and literatures, I am naturally skeptical of such a position. I fervently believe that foreign language learning is essential for children’s development into informed and productive citizens of the world. But even more urgent is my alarm at the growing tendency to accept and even foster the decline of the sort of interpersonal human contact that learning languages both requires and cultivates.
[...] The difference between natural and computer languages is not merely one of degree, with natural languages’ involving vocabularies that are several orders of magnitude larger than those of computer languages. Natural languages aren’t just more complex versions of the algorithms with which we teach machines to do tasks; they are also the living embodiments of our essence as social animals. We express our love and our losses, explore beauty, justice and the meaning of our existence, and even come to know ourselves all through natural languages.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Monday March 25 2019, @12:21PM
Any specialised field will have its own vocabulary - whether its mathematics, chemistry, music, law, social science... Mathematics contains multiple "languages" (there's at least 3 notations for differential calculus with different histories). Making a special case for computer programming just because it uses the word "language" for some types of technical notation is spurious.
In other news, baseball is just applied Newtonian physics and should count as a science and maths qualification...
Education - at least up to high school level - should be about breadth of knowledge and skills, which entails a certain amount of forcing kids to study things that they otherwise wouldn't. The problem is the idea that any student should "fail" because they don't emerge as a perfect "Renaissance Man" polymath - that idea needs to be dropped before you start handing out the career-defining certificates. Society needs good coders, mathematicians, lawyers, poets, footballers, musicians... it doesn't need people branded as "failures" because they can't do them all. Credit people for what they are good at, not what they are bad at. That doesn't mean that the kid who produced a lovely finger-painting in third grade should get the sane credit as the one who found and corrected all of the errors in the algebra exam - in fact its the current 'deficit model' that encourages that sort of dumbing down so that more people can 'pass'.
That's exactly what will happen if 'coding' replaces 'foreign language' - millions of kids will be taught to write 'Hello World' programs in Python or memorise (with no understanding) the code for a quicksort - because that's a hell of a lot easier than failing to learn French.