Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

I get that there's only so much time in the day, so only a finite number of courses can be meaningfully conducted before a student graduates. This was an issue when I was a student at Georgia Tech. Most engineering students received some 130+ credit hours (1 credit hour = 1 hour lecture or 3 hour lab per week) over their degree. To complete this in 4 years (8 semesters) meant an average of 16 credits/semester which was very hard (especially when dealing with prerequisites, which meant you might have a 9-12 (core) + 3-6 (elective) credit semester followed by an 18 (core) credit semester, those latter ones could be brutal). At GT, compared to other GA universities, there were no language requirements and somewhat reduced general education requirements (still true?). And many (most? don't know the stats) students took 5 years (or 10 semesters) to complete their education. But GT didn't say, "CS 1301 will be a substitute for 101", they just said, "Everyone will take CS 1301, and 101 will be an elective."

If the people proposing these changes made more courses substitute for each other, then I think their argument would have more weight. Make foreign language an option along with technology education, advanced math (those that can be held concurrent to the core math courses), and other topical electives. Make the selection akin to selecting a "major" focus at university. Instead, the schools want to include something that seems to be useful (I would agree, programming skills are useful) but have no way to fit it in to the existing time available and are forcing one department to make a sacrifice.

Are _these_ meanings the meaning that define language?

To say that programming languages exist to convey meaning does not equate to being able to express all meanings.

His programming class however sucked all the fun out of it. His brother-in-law was a retired manager at Motorola and gave him a bunch of (even for the time) thoroughly obsolete suggestions:

Everything started with being handed a specification. From there, you had to write a solution in pseudo code, which was a separate language from the one we were learning (TrueBasic I believe). Once your pseudo code was handed in and approved, you could begin programming; however, you had to document up-front all the variables you were going to be using and document their purposes. In addition, you had to explain in plain english what each subroutine did and what variables it would access and state whether it would simply read or read and write them (and then explain why).

I remember him saying "If you're a professional programmer, there's a good chance you'll have a manager who isn't a programmer and they'll be reviewing your work!" I think he took his brother-in-laws advice too much to heart, because he really felt like he was giving us all a real taste of what being a "real" programmer was like. Sadly, this was 1998, and I suspect software development hadn't operated like that for a good 15-20 years (or if this was a weird practice localized to Motorola in the 70s)

Any programming classes taught to minors should favor core fundamentals, exploration and creativity and avoid dwelling on industry practices which often have a shelf-life measured in years.