from the {for (i=1;i<=100;i++){this++}} dept.
¿Hablas C++? In Florida, lawmakers are debating a proposal to swap the two foreign language courses required by the state's high schools for classes in programming languages such as JavaScript and Python.
The measure, championed by a former Yahoo executive turned state senator, would let students substitute traditional foreign language studies for courses in coding, often seen as key skill in an increasingly technological era.
"This is a global language today," said Sen. Jeremy Ring (D) of Margate, the bill's sponsor, at a hearing on Wednesday. "Computers and programming have become part of our global culture."
There's growing enthusiasm about teaching coding to American students, with President Obama last weekend unveiling a $4.2 billion plan to expand computer science education, which he said had become "a basic skill, right along with the three 'R's" — reading, writing, and arithmetic.
What if they said, "they may learn math or how to read, but not both?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:40AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:43AM
Because we're already a country of lardasses as it is. The last thing we need is to further cut back on physical activities.
But, the correct solution is to spend more on education so that there's no need to choose.
That being said, coding is not an acceptable substitute for a foreign language. The two are definitely not the same and you definitely don't get the same thing out of them. Foreign language is more broadly useful over all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:55AM
Because we're already a country of lardasses as it is. The last thing we need is to further cut back on physical activities.
Since when is sitting on your fat ass in a stadium, drinking beer and eating meat tubes of questionable provenance, and watching some unpaid students run around a field, a physical activity?
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:25AM
Because we're already a country of lardasses as it is. The last thing we need is to further cut back on physical activities.
Schools are supposed to promote education critical thinking, not make people do tedious physical exercises that have no educational benefits whatsoever and can be learned on one's own time. If someone can't even be bothered to exercise of their own volition, they are hopeless in that regard.
But, the correct solution is to spend more on education so that there's no need to choose.
Spending more money doing the same thing will likely not bring many benefits. The current issues are that schools teach to the test, promote authoritarianism, promote rote memorization over understanding, and have so many students that individualized learning becomes nearly impossible. It's one-size-fits-all nonsense.
That being said, coding is not an acceptable substitute for a foreign language.
That being said, foreign languages are taught horribly, and so the classes tend to be a waste of time. Then again, that criticism can be applied to all subjects, so it's not really an argument against teaching foreign languages specifically. However, I don't think they're even useful for most people, at least not in the US. And not all foreign languages would even have the same practical benefits. Having them as electives is fine.
I think we should focus on the core subjects more than anything else; we can't even teach them properly as it is. That isn't quite the same as saying that we should have nothing else.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:08AM
You might want to do some research there. Physical exercise is mandatory for effective learning. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/how-exercise-can-help-us-learn/?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
And you are right that spending money doesn't automatically bring results, but schools are so poorly funded now that they often times don't even have a library with a librarian and librarian's assistant to get kids interested in reading books. And the books used in classes are often times decades old and weren't very good to begin with.
No argument about the quality of language instruction, but I don't think that the programming classes are much better other than using books that are much more recent.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:33AM
You might want to do some research there. Physical exercise is mandatory for effective learning.
The link you provided simply talks about memorization, which is only slightly relevant. Furthermore, it mentions that that study conflicts with another study, and these are still only a few studies at most. I grow tired of people citing random studies and pretending they mark the end of the discussion, especially when they link to social science studies. Is there good scientific consensus? Have these studies been adequately replicated? Was the data properly collected, and is it statistically significant? Are the conclusions they reached from the data even justified, or are there alternative explanations? Most of the time, these questions are ignored in favor of promoting a certain conclusion by linking to very particular studies.
But even if I assume that is true, that would not at all imply that pushing physical exercise in schools is worthwhile endeavor. The schools will likely not even pay attention to the research, and the circumstances under which exercise boosts learning ability will be ignored, potentially causing their efforts to have negligible benefits or even to be harmful. Do the schools push the types of exercises that allow people to learn most effectively (if it matters), for the right length of time, and at the right time? I doubt they pay any heed to any of this. Furthermore, if the students have no will to exercise of their own volition, then they are doomed either way.
No argument about the quality of language instruction, but I don't think that the programming classes are much better other than using books that are much more recent.
I don't think programming courses should be mandatory either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:22PM
That goes counter to thousands of years of thought on what it means to be well-educated. Your vision of education is better suited for directed instruction, such as one would get at a trade school. However, physical education is considered a very important part of a complete education.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday February 10 2016, @02:43AM
Nice quotes. But no, the type of education I advocate for is very academic in nature, which tedious physical exercise is not, and which public schools currently fail at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:00PM
My dad learned two languages in school. Neither one got used, but later in life he could have used German. How was he to know?
My uncle kind of needed Japanese and Russian. Neither one was available in school, and anyway how would he have guessed?
Think I'll ever benefit from the time I spent fruitlessly struggling with French? Eh, NO, but Chinese would be helpful.
See a pattern here? It's different if you don't natively use the most economically valuable language. Somebody in Quebec should obviously learn English. There are places with harder choices, where a regionally important language might compete with English. If you already speak English though, there is no other second language choice that obviously stands above all the other choices. You already speak the language of commerce, science, air traffic, programming, and so many other things.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:59AM
Have you seen how portly children are now? Not even in the 90s, in the wake of "OMG CHILDHOOD OBESITY" did we see the little lardasses we're seeing now.
Maybe increasing school time by another hour and making them run on a treadmill for another hour, sure, do both. But something needs to be done long as they're chugging the high fructose corn syrup like the little addicts they are.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:30AM
That should be tackled another way, rather than trying to fit physical activities into a environment that is supposed to be about education. We don't need to turn schools into nannies, though I know they largely already are. And at most, any benefits will be temporary, because if they only exercise because the school makes them, then as soon as the school stops making them or they get out of school, they will likely not feel the need to exercise any longer.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:38AM
I don't disagree, but that requires that whole "personal responsibility" thing that everyone on both sides of the fence are SOOOPER uncomfortable with.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:38PM
rather than trying to fit physical activities into a environment that is supposed to be about education
Education for children should include "physical education". However quality physical education might be hard to come by.
Maybe you don't have to go to this extent but there's much useful stuff to learn in that field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fISgKl8dB3M [youtube.com]
In fact, if you teach stuff that isn't too crap, much of it might remain useful for a lot longer than most of the other stuff they teach at schools. I remember having to memorize stuff I knew was useless and proven later to be useless due to changes in politics and economy (names of countries change, their top exports too, and even "history" can change).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:26AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @07:10AM
Microgoogpple will no doubt be getting "tax rebates" for inserting their "free" appendages into this lucrative education contract...
Football - smallchange. Now the professional crooks are moving in on education...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:42AM
I speak 4 languages fluently (which isn't even that many), and that let me have a better grasp of other cultures, learn how other people think, and have access to more of the world. As a result, I strongly believe learning them turned me into a fairer and more rounded individual. Matter of fact, in all the countries I've lived in, I always noticed close minded bigots where often those who didn't speak anything but their native languages - and not very well at that, either.
On the other hand, the many computer languages I've learned only let me talk to computers in different ways. Computer never answer, never teach me anything useful and never enlighten me...
So to me, this is a choice between turning into a better computer engineer, or into a better person, at an age at which it's very important to become the latter. It's not just a matter of languages.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:06AM
I'm not sure being a better person ever got me anything, personally. Sincerely, good for you. I'll stick to my hobbies and programming languages.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:27AM
If new programming languages don't teach you a new way to think, then you are learning the wrong programming languages. Probably you've been learning programming languages which were based on the very same paradigms as those you already knew.
Or possibly you were learning languages that bring something new to the table but also allow you to program in an old way, and simply ignored the new ways those languages allow you to express things.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Francis on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:10AM
That's true. Python made me come up with all new and innovative ways of cursing people's mothers and their sexual fidelity.
(Score: 3, Touché) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:28PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:58PM
and that let me have a better grasp of other cultures, learn how other people think, and have access to more of the world
Lucky for you. I had Mrs Multicultural for my first two years of Spanish and at one time I could tell you all about the government of Mexico and food from Chile and history of Peru and whatever. Its all completely useless, but like many useless things its none the less interesting. Unfortunately I had to drop my third year Spanish because I got dumped into Mr Conjugation's class where all we did was drill -n- kill obscure grammar and vocabulary worksheets and kids who spent two years talking about Argentine economics were doomed compared to the kids who spent two years filling out lower level drill -n- kill worksheets. That was a long time ago. Now a days I watch Telemundo sometimes because that ethnic group still treats women as sex objects and sometimes that's fun. Every time I watch a legacy media television news weather man give his report he's some wrinkly proto-elderly baby boomer gray man in a suit, and I can't help but think to myself that the Hispanics know how to give a weather report resulting in great ratings.
As an older dude, I can assure you the language's are useful when you grow up meme is about as tired as "you'll be required to use cursive when you're older" meme. Its been completely utterly freaking useless over the entire course of my life, both cursive and being able to kinda speak spanish. Now stand by for the anecdote deluge of people who once talked to a landscaper at work in Spanish so its obviously vital to their current level of success or they once wrote something in cursive.
Its not like computer education is any more competent anyway. All I really got out of elementary school was singing "don't copy that floppy" as a class (or whatever it was) and in 2016 nobody but the old timers knows what a floppy is, and everyone uses FOSS, so its doubly obsolete.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:46PM
I have to kinda agree with you. When I was a kid every adult, educator, authority figure, whatever, told me 100 times a day that learning other languages would make me successful as an adult. So I did. Learned 5 of them.
I have never once needed any of them in my career.
I still learn languages because it's fun. It's a hobby. It has been good to de-mystify what people are saying in Chinese or German or whatever, but in the end they're yelling the same things at their kids as everybody else, complaining about their boss, and so on.
But all of that is not professionally useful, has never gotten me a raise, has never gotten me that special promotion, or any of that sort of thing.
The one main use, if there is any, is to take away the intimidation factor of being a monolingual person vis-a-vis people who do speak more than one language. Europeans classically love to browbeat Americans about that. So, too, do your Ivy Leaguers their "lesser" countrymen. Going them one better is fun also.
I was once in transit from my Mandarin immersion program in Manchuria, in Paris, to continue on to visit my Belgian girlfriend who was studying Mandarin in Bordeaux. I stopped at a cafe, ordered a coffee in French. The rude Parisian waiter from central casting got snotty in English. I answered in German, Japanese, then Mandarin. He shut right the hell up. It's a gratuitous story, but it was a step up in confidence for me. I was no longer the yokel, anywhere.
So maybe that confidence boost is still worth the effort to learn another language.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dmbasso on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:05PM
Let's go meta here:
all of that is not professionally useful
Modern society breeds people to be cogs in the machine, and that's the problem. Everything has to result in monetary profit somehow. Then you get those depressed, super-effective billionaires with empty lives.
It is good you've found "utility" for your language knowledge, but sad that you emphasized the competition aspect. When I recall these kinds of events, the first one that comes to mind is when I was able to have a really nice conversation with some random farmer in the north of Italy. Also how I was able to woo a Taiwanese girl with whom I had a brief relationship. Or when I was visiting a tower in Porto, and a Japanese couple waited for my passage and I said "domo arigatou", then the guy said "we're Korean", to which I replied "usotsuki!" and we had a good laugh and a brief conversation. Positive things for everybody involved.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:14PM
I agree with you, and thank you for mentioning the positive aspects of knowing other languages. It is enriching as a human being to know them.
I mentioned the competition aspect because VLM spoke to their not being useful in one's career (with the obvious exceptions of a translator, international salesperson, etc). Beyond the extra bit of confidence I've gotten from it it's never been professionally useful for me either. So his point still stands. Or, at least, his point still has standing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:49AM
of people who don't understand the concept. I took 2 semesters of high school spanish. Towards the end of the second semester we took a field trip to Tijuana (I'm in San Diego), we tried to talk to the locals and they just looked at us. Seems 2 semesters of high school spanish teach you to speak a spanish that isn't really spoken in the real world.
I learned BASIC in about a month. Z-80 assembly took about 2 months. 8086 assembly another couple weeks. All self taught. C took another month. I'd say the basics of perl were a week, 2 months to get good at it. Python about 2 days. ADA maybe a week to realize it wasn't capable of doing what needed doing (1990 or so, I needed bit manipulation of hardware registers, at the time hardware manipulation was verboten). Java I learned last year, 2 days to get good at it, another month to learn the libraries.
The point is, computer languages are nothing like real languages. Trying to tie the two together is just silly.
CSB
Mom was from rural Illinois. In the mid-70's, when I was too young to drive, I flew out there a week ahead of the rest of the family, who was driving. Kell Il had an annual fish fry, went to it with my relatives. They had a contest, who came the farthest for their fish fry. I won, being from San Diego. Went up to claim my prize, the guy hosting the event looked at me with a blank look and said "Hmmm, San Diego. That's close to Tijuana, isn't it?".
/CSB
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Funny) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:54AM
I had four years of Spanish in high school, and two years of it in college. I can barely decode written emails better than google translate.
Unless you get dumped there (whereever there is) for a couple weeks, I am not sure it is possible to speak the native language.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:48AM
no, this just shows your education system can't handle foreign languages properly. romanian here, was taught french from 1992 until 2002 (school through highschool, 2 hours a week), and in 2006 when I ended up in a french speaking university I was perfectly able to take classes, and it only took a couple of months for me to be able to carry out reasonable conversations in french --- but this was mostly because three quarters of the time we would use english instead.
oh yeah. I'm not counting english (which I only studied in school from 1995 until 2002) because I did watch a lot of movies and cartoons in english, which I guess is not that easy with spanish unless you're into soap operas.
don't worry. in europe, big country people can't speak other languages either, unless they want to work outside their own country. smaller countries are the only ones that handle foreign languages properly in school (for instance the english spoken by dutch people sounds to me to be within the BBC/euronews/CNN english spectrum).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:19AM
True. I think I have anime to thank for giving me the necessary exposure to Japanese after I had to stop taking formal classes. I took formal classes on and off for about a year or two, and it's probably thanks to anime that until now I still know how to speak Japanese with sufficient fluency, six or seven years after the last ones I took. Exposure to a language is a big part of language acquisition.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:53PM
I've been doing that to keep up with my kids who are in a dual language spanish class at school, and to encourage them that learning other languages is useful and fun. But all the ones produced in Mexico seem to be about drug lords, which is a despicable activity to glorify, so I watch the few produced in Spain available on Netflix. Except, now I seem to be developing this terrible lisp...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:58PM
Some of it could be chalked up to necessity: when you live in a country so large that depending on where you start you could drive for days and still be surrounded by people who speak the same language as you then how seriously are most going to take those high school courses? For many Americans there is no need to know Spanish unless you intend to work in a kitchen or manage a team of landscapers.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:40PM
That is how my state looks at it. Most people will never leave the country for money reasons. Being near the center of the country means that less foreigners immigrate here. So learning a programming language is more beneficial.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:38AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:56PM
Well, all the programming languages you mentioned are more or less imperative. How long would it take you to learn something like Lisp, Prolog, Standard ML, Haskell or other languages that aren't? It took a big conceptual shift to learn them.
Jumping in here...loved your comment.
I've been cranking away on-and-off at learning Haskell for five years now. I'm barely proficient in it, but it's really made me appreciate things like type theory and recursion at a level I'd barely even considered previously.
It's truly made me a better programmer overall.
Downside: It's made me somewhat scornful of run-of-the-mill programming languages and programmers. (not kidding, either)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:32PM
Are you sure you learned C well in a week? As in, you understood that certain operations have undefined behaviour, and why they may bite you even if in your tests they seem to work as expected? As in, you learned about the aliasing rules, and why you may be in for a surprise if you access memory through the wrong pointer? As in, you knew that your function names should not start with "str", and double underscores should not be used? As in, you could distinguish things that were true just for your compiler from things guaranteed to be true on every conforming compiler? As in, you learned that it is a good idea to avoid two adjacent question marks, even in comments?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:20AM
the time is coming ... where our jobs will be replaced by robots/ai ...
we will have to service them ... it should be no surprise ...
that people are being encouraged/paid to learn computer language(s) ...
eventually robots/AI will provide us with those "universal translators" you hear about in science fiction ...
through their cold/dead/AI nature the robots may fulfill the statue which comes alive in biblical revelations ...
many wonder how we could ever live in a world where someone or thing is cold enough to demand we all ...
wear a mark ... or be excluded from buying/selling or worse ... death ...
the cold/dead/AI nature will likely demand worship and bring about the mark of the beast ...
the cold/dead/AI nature won't shed a tear if you decline the mark ...
especially if we become soylent green to them as we are older or become disabled and unable ...
to service the 'beasts' ...
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:21AM
persist(OUTPUT_1);
pester(COLLEAGUE_UPSTAIRS);
request(FACEBOOK_HELP);
if(!access_to(FRIEND_3)
continue;
understood = try_send(encode_huf(NOTABUG, "wikipedia saves the day"));
}
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:03AM
But it seems to me that none of this stuff is all that difficult.
Perhaps K-12 has changed significantly since I left thirty-odd years ago, but there were plenty of students back then who had no interest in learning, which I thought was rather odd, since I always loved learning -- not school, per se -- but learning. Those of us who wanted to learn, for whatever reason, were able to do so, despite the crappy, antiquated facilities in the urban public schools I attended.
I suspect that this has not changed. Those who are motivated to learn, whether it be math, foreign languages (Ich habe in meinem Gymnasium um drei jahre Deutsche gelernt. Nach dreissig jahren, ich kann Deutsche noch sprechen, obwohl mein Vokabular schlecht ist), the sciences or coding, will do so. Those who aren't, won't.
I've often thought that providing a positive school experience throughout K-12 has the effect of helping children make the most out of their learning opportunities. I'm not a teacher or an education theorist, but it seems to me that could have at least as beneficial an effect as spending more money.
Of course, unless parents are focused on, and consciously work to create it, there isn't any way to create a home environment that encourages learning and provides a rich set of experiences to stimulate intellectual curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by seeprime on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:05AM
The US educational system finally realized that coding languages are real languages that communicate in specific ways, with machines instead of people. I like it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:56AM
This has been known for decades and maybe you've seen children of bilingual parents learn both languages effortlessly.
http://developpement-langagier.fpfcb.bc.ca/en/optimal-age-learning-second-language [fpfcb.bc.ca]
(Score: 2) by Dale on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:09PM
It is a neat idea and anything that exposes more students to coding is a good thing. However, colleges are still going to require the foreign language credits and if the students don't get them done in high school that just means more time wasted in college (assuming they aren't majoring in that foreign language) taking those classes anyhow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:09PM
Shop around. Pick one that won't demand a useless language.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:37PM
This guy gives an excellent talk, that frames the (obvious when you hear it) that our education system was designed to fill factories.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley?language=en [ted.com]
In that regard it would appear that getting student "through graduation" has become the only metric that is used, and "how much learned" is the political football that is kicked around.
I have learnt most of my computing (maths, and other sciences) on my own. Languages need interaction in order to develop neural pathways - maybe computers will help here after all?
I've never used that Rosetta software, but I have read that is uses feedback...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:50PM
where's the racism? salary drop? h1b! h1B H1B. trying to undercut programmers wage. BADBADBAD
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:42PM
Look I know a bunch of people are going to be thinking 'oh noes cheap programmers'.
I went to a private school. We were all required to take programming. A minimum of 3 semesters. Out of the 80 or so people in my class a grand total of 2 people are programmers. Maybe 5 or so were any good at it. The rest did not care and moved onto other things.
Honestly it is a rather boring discipline. You need to know how to think logically and be able to infer what happened with scant evidence. You need to be able to write concisely and in order what should happen. Then apply patterns you learned from experience. If you can do that you might be able to be a programmer.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:46PM
Learning programming can potentially equip kids with good and bad skills. One of the thing programming did for me was to help develop my analytical and logical thinking skills. One of the bad side-effects that I've noted, not just in me, but everyday in other developers is thinking in binary terms. The world unfortunately is not - and kids should not be conditioned to think in binary terms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @02:50AM
Learning a foreign language is about immersing yourself in another culture: learning how to view the world differently based on an entirely different culture. The language is just one small part of that, and is the gateway to bring further awareness on how other people think. Learning how different cultures translate and define "freedom" or "young" is extremely telling and can help a monoliterate to realize there are other legitimate ways of viewing things. A programming language is simply converting prose text into math using some intermediary abstraction (Java, ASM, binary, etc..). Anyone conflating the two likely knows nothing about either. They have nothing in common. It's very sad the state of education in the US. :(