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

nytimes.com

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

#141

Post by itronitron »

spamizbad wrote: post #108
mywittyname wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a similar experience. My first programming teacher in high school was also my geometry teacher; a subject he taught extremely well (at least from my 15 year old point of view). 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 specific…

>> "If you're a professional programmer, there's a good chance you'll have a manager

This is the number one reason that schools should not try to teach students employable skills, because they usually get it very wrong. Teaching youngsters business processes that will be 10 years old when they graduate from college severely limits what they can achieve.

I am all for teaching coding and other creative activities, but these should be explorations. Let the student discover on their own the degree of technical rigor they want to apply themselves to.

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

#142

Post by Lasokki »

jonny_eh wrote: post #131
xg15 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about wanting to, I don't know, travel to and work in foreign countries one day?

Having a CS education can help pay for that, and help you get work visas. I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare can help though. Also, learning French won't help you in Germany, but learning JavaScript will help you land a job there if you speak English (a friend of mine who doesn't speak German moved there to do just that).

Having experience in learning a language helps you to learn more languages. In this particular example, understanding that nouns have grammatical gender in French is a helpful bit of linguistics to know that softens the blow when the JavaScript developer decides to learn German.

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

#143

Post by itronitron »

pjc50 wrote: post #121
wang_li wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a challenge for you, or anyone really. Translate Gettysburg Address into your programming language of choice and present it here for determining of those fluent in your chosen language understand what you have translated. Constraints: You can't use print statements to echo the English text of the address. You can't use English or English-like identifiers. I know of no programming language that can convey the m…

Reminds me of Peter Norvig's translation into PowerPoint: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ (satirizing its overuse and flattening of style)

soulwise, these are trying times

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

#144

Post by cwp »

sorenn111 wrote: post #101

It is clearly not a foreign language, but it might honestly be a better substitute for most students' time. In the US, a foreign language can be a great thing to learn, but with our failing math and science teachings, perhaps shifting towards CS instead might be a good idea for helping many high school kids prepare for a STEM dominated job market. From the article: "It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief tha…

It's fashionable to dismiss the humanities today, but we're not talking about Latin here. Speaking Spanish or Mandarin or Hindi is tremendously practical and opens up a wider range of opportunity than learning to code. CS is great, but it's not for everyone, even those who do pursue CS can benefit from being able to communicate with more people.

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

#145

Post by evv »

Jtsummers wrote: post #67
evv wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

Call me crazy, but the synthetic vs. natural distinction is still blurry to me. All language is the natural evolution of thought.

> But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time.

On this, we agree. This is the exact phenomena that I observe of computer languages.

As a small example, take the "if" statement as used in JavaScript. It wasn't invented by that language, it was borrowed from other languages like Java. But the word "if" came from English. Of course, English speakers didn't invent the concept either. As you describe, English evolved from other languages.

Computer languages are more modern, so we know more of their history. We know who drafted the first iteration of JavaScript, and we've closely tracked its evolution since then. We don't know who came up with the concept of "if", but I doubt that it was given to us humans by some divine god of language.. I think one of our ancestors invented it.

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

#146

Post by gubbrora »

Lasokki wrote: post #142
jonny_eh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a CS education can help pay for that, and help you get work visas. I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare can help though. Also, learning French won't help you in Germany, but learning JavaScript will help you land a job there if you speak English (a friend of mine who doesn't speak German moved there to do just that).

Having experience in learning a language helps you to learn more languages. In this particular example, understanding that nouns have grammatical gender in French is a helpful bit of linguistics to know that softens the blow when the JavaScript developer decides to learn German.

So you spend a year to save a day. Doesn't sound very wise.

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

#147

Post by Lasokki »

B-Con wrote: post #115
citizenkeen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.

The fine arts are great, after you've put food on the table and a roof over your head. Most people are much happier to have stable employment than esoteric knowledge. The economy and society are better for it too. School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.

At least here in Finland high school (or more precisely, upper secondary school) is regarded to provide students with "general knowledge" and a least exposure to various different fields of study. How are you supposed to know what you want to do in life, if you do not know what possibilities there are?

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

#148

Post by buu700 »

Seriously? This was funny to joke about in high school, but we shouldn't encode something obviously ridiculous into our legislation...

It's one thing if they want to make foreign language study optional or broaden the requirement to be less specific, but as-is this will just lead to needless confusion.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #97
droithomme wrote: post #2

Computer languages are called languages for a reason. They have syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and are used for communication. People who don't speak english for example but who read python can often read code you wrote and understand it. Math is a similar thing and sometimes called a universal language. These are different sorts of languages from day to day spoken and written languages for general communication, but t…

Communicate "Hello World!" in python without some sort of string that references another spoken language.

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by yellowapple »

tracker1 wrote: post #97
droithomme wrote: post #2

Computer languages are called languages for a reason. They have syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and are used for communication. People who don't speak english for example but who read python can often read code you wrote and understand it. Math is a similar thing and sometimes called a universal language. These are different sorts of languages from day to day spoken and written languages for general communication, but t…

Communicate "Hello World!" in python without some sort of string that references another spoken language.

    # assuming Python3
    print("\U0001F310\U0001F44B")
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