It's true that taking a programming class isn't the same as taking a high school foreign language class, but it's also true that taking a high school foreign language class is unlikely to give you any meaningful proficiency in that language: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/the_marginal_pr.htm...
Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
81–90 of 191 posts
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#82No, not any more than math or statistics are. Replacing a foreign language with a programming course is like replacing a music class with a math course; you may think it's a good idea, but it's not because it's replacing the same type of thing.
Both math and music are often called languages. Of course that doesn't mean schools can replace foreign language requirements with them.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#83Quite interesting that the reason I didn't like Scala was that it was like a natural language. There was interacting context that wasn't immediately visible at the use site. I wonder if linguists or Perl lovers like Scala more than others?
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#84Spoiler for those tired of question-begging headlines: The author's answer is "no."
It sounds like you're criticizing the author/editor for playing coy, but I don't think that's fair.
That "No" is smack dab at the extreme beginning, within the subtitle.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#85Quite interesting that the reason I didn't like Scala was that it was like a natural language. There was interacting context that wasn't immediately visible at the use site. I wonder if linguists or Perl lovers like Scala more than others?
Larry Wall studied linguistics, so that's an apropos (and fun) question, I'd say.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes computer languages not "natural"? Like every other language, it was invented by animals(humans).
Computer languages are synthetic, like the human languages of Esperanto and Loglan. The distinction is how they're formed and developed. Someone didn't sit down 1500 or so years ago and say, "I'm going to make English." It just grew. Specifically Old English grew from a combination of languages used by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in particular). It also borrowed a fair amount of Latin, Old Norse, and p…
It's not just synthetic, as in designed from whole cloth: it is a set of instructions designed for a synthetic system.
A computer "brain" does not operate remotely like a human brain. Therefore, the languages must be fundamentally different.
We apply syntactic sugar as a coping mechanism but the ultimate language is nothing like a human language.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#87To make the counter argument, it is rather unfortunate that the way foreign languages are normally taught in U.S. schools (grammar first to make it painful) leads to the cliche of “I took 4 years of French in high school and I can only speak very little.” On this line, make computer languages a foreign language, as schools do a poor job overall teaching a foreign language so that it can be truly acquired. The advanta…
Well four years of a language won't result in you being a very good speaker anyway. The key here is that foreign language classes also teach you about other cultures, which is definitely important.
Yes, that's probably the best justification for a high school curriculum that includes some number of years of foreign language. If classroom high school language isn't supplemented with more immersive or day-to-day use, you're probably not going to get to the point where you can write, speak, understand the language comfortably.
I had 4 years of high school French and I was even relatively good at it, albeit not quite top of class. Today, I'm more comfortable in a French-speaking country than someone who knows no French at all, but my skill level is really pretty low.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do we get law makers (or, more importantly, their constituents) to understand this? There's a huge push towards vocational education and parents thinks that "coding" is something their 10 year old can learn then apply to make buckets of money. Plus, you know, it's called a programming "language." If I personally had to chose between a foreign language course, or programming one as a learn-but-never-really-app…
I dunno. It's hard for me to see a year (say) of a foreign language that's never used outside of that class as having a lot of value. As I dimly remember my high school language classes, you didn't even really get into literature and culture associated with the language until later on. On the other hand, a year of a language like Python probably has some value in teaching logic and problem-solving even if the student…
I feel like teaching coding is a waste of resources, for several reasons: there's a glut of material readily available for individual study; what's taught will be largely irrelevant when the student graduates; and importantly, it will likely be poorly taught. Good CS teachers can probably get jobs paying 3x as much, so only the most dedicated will stick with teaching.
My opinions are probably biased because I had an otherwise good teacher who was just poorly trained, and it was a huge setback for me. I really enjoyed programming, until I took a course in high school. This lead me to pursuing chemistry in college until I learned to program again on my own (after which, I flipped to CS).
I think it would be better to add discrete logic to math courses. That way, students learn the fundamentals that they can apply independently, or in college.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#89I think people like to say that programming languages aren't in the same vein as natural languages. But from my personal experience in both fields, I can't help but feel that they're clearly related.
Natural languages are harder to learn, less regular and more general than programming languages, but whenever I study either, they bring to my mind the same sort of efforts and intuitions. Programming languages definitely don't replace foreign languages lessons in high schools, and so on. But the popular dismissal of "they have nothing to do with natural languages" is probably wrong, I think.
My sample set is... fluent in French and English, studied/studying Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese, and similarly for imperative/functional/wtv paradigm PLs. There's clearly ressemblance in learning one or the other.
Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It satisfied the foreign language requirement
Bertrand Russell argued against the use of learning Greek and Latin in the early 1930s -- for the reason that previously, the main source of education and culture and just plain 'new ideas' for people around the time of the Enlightenment was the written records of the Greeks and Romans. Nowadays the bulk of new ideas are in living foreign languages like French, Italian, Russian, etc. I know that, for example, Spain i…
As someone who took Latin, I don't disagree. Yes, English has roots in Latin. It also has roots in Anglo-Saxon and French. I'm not convinced that Latin has a unique pedagogical value for English speakers. It feels more like, outside of classical studies programs, a vestige of what a curriculum for properly-educated upper classes looked like a hundred years ago.
There's nothing wrong with many aspects of such a curriculum but it probably belongs as part of a classics major at a liberal arts college rather than a language option at a typical high school.