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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.
CS is about rationally mathematically describing a step by step algorithm , foreign language is about getting to communicate with human , foreign cultures, and getting a bit outside your own cocoon. They are not for the same purpose and practically have nothing to do to each others. Making such equivalence make no sense to me.
Or two years of an actual foreign language. There have been studies that show that learning a foreign language helps programmers program better and read code better.