Slashdot Mirror
Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission
theodp writes On Wednesday, Washington State held a public hearing on House Bill 1445, which proposes a study "to allow two years of computer sciences to count as two years of world languages for the purposes of admission into a four-year institution of higher education." Among the questions posed by the House Higher Education Committee to a UW rep at the hearing was the following: "What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?" The promise of programming jobs, promoted by Microsoft execs and other MS folks like ex-Program Manager Audrey Sniezek (ironically laid off last summer), has prompted Kentucky to ponder a similar measure.
This. I love coding and languages both, but they aren't even remotely the same. I think learning actual languages does two things that coding doesn't: it gets you to speak to real people (hopefully, if you're doing it right) and it helps you learn a little bit about another culture. Practicing your ability to deal with differences and similarities and maybe even to empathize with other people is a really important life skill that you aren't going to get at all from coding.
Plus, even from a business perspective, it seems to me that in general people who can talk to people end up making more money than people who only know how to talk to machines.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
If they are going to do this for CS they may as well do it for music. Musical notation and I suppose math are the only two notation systems that are consistent in any culture. (I don't particularly agree with the premise of the OP)
love is just extroverted narcissism
Math isn't a 'foreign language', and you can't speak prolog to get directions or understand a native culture.
"What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?"
Steve Jobs has this one:
“I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great....None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
If all you do is write code and never learn to communicate, you're going to end up writing code like Microsoft does (seriously, 16,000 lines in a single file? And there are plenty of other lengthy files too, that's not really an anomaly).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hell, my wife told me a story, she was a new undergrad at MIT and the new residents in the dorm were hanging out in the lounge getting to know one another. They got on the topic of foreign languages since there were a lot of kids from other countries or who had traveled fairly extensively, and when one boy was asked how many languages he knew, he replied, "computer, or other?" which drew lambasting from his fellow nerds at arguably one of the nerdiest universities in the world.
Computer languages are not interpersonal communication languages, and they should not be treated as such. That doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with the foreign language requirements for college admittance (ie, if EVERYONE is supposed to go to college at a given school whether they actually should or not, then foreign language is taught to the lowest-common-denominator and no one learns it well) but treating things that aren't spoken or written human languages as such is stupid.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Empathy and conflict management are things best learned in childhood (despite today's trends towards shielding kids from them). You don't need to study foreign language for that. Do we really need to learn 16 different ways to communicate when it takes so much time out of a curriculum to learn them? If learning languages was as easy as picking up the latest book and spending a few months, then you'd have a point, but unless you're a prodigy, it takes years to master any language enough to not sound like an idiot. If you need to communicate with someone at a high level who shares no common language with you, then hire a translator. The translator would've spent the years required to learn both languages and cultural customs. Those of us with other priorities don't have the time.
Yeah, the talkers make more money than the doers. What else is new? Why should we encourage this? People already spend too much time yammering.
Learning two years of any spoken language doesn't sound like much.
Here in Germany I had 9 years of English and 5 years of French.
I had the option to reduce French to 4 years by switching to Latin.
I chose to learn 2 years of Spanish on top of that.
And by the end of high school I had already taught myself C++ for 8 years.
So don't complain about having to learn a foreign language.