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.
10 PRINT "WTF"
20 GOTO 10
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.
Assembler is coded the same in all 196 countries. So the next time you are on holiday just shift some registers to communicate with whomever, wherever you are!
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
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.
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.
Forgive me, I had to.
"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."
So why'd you take Spanish then?
I took German. German is the language of many engineers, and a place where there's lots of tech companies. Spanish is the language of kitchen line cooks and janitors and landscapers. There's almost no Spanish-speaking engineers or programmers out there.
If you're going into a STEM field, the languages you should be looking at are German, Japanese, and Mandarin (not necessarily in that order, it really depends on what sub-field within STEM you're interested in). If your goal in life is to start a restaurant or a landscaping business, however, Spanish would be an asset.
Next up - making 2 years of sitting on the couch playing games equivalent to 2 years of physical education!
After all, if Reagan can try to classify ketchup as a vegetable ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It may be the second or third most spoken IRL, but in terms of off-shoring, most of the jobs go to places that speak English (India), Chinese (China), Russian (Russia), and Portuguese (Brazil). So, knowing Spanish or French isn't as useful *in his profession*.
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.
Interesting point, but most German engineers are going to speak English better than you can speak German. I imagine the same is true for Japan. The advantage of Spanish (or what people realize less often, French) is that you have large poorer territories in South America and especially Africa where perhaps there'd be more difficulty getting someone with US tech experience to head up an office.
This is primarily a question of how much we value general education though. People forget the main reason to learn a second language is just an exercise in learning and seeing how another language works. Most people are never going to speak a second language well enough to use it professionally. People who want a university education should still have to have a well-rounded education even if they're majoring in CS. That means learning some history and foreign language.
So does getting regular sleep and exercise. Does that mean we should we force all CS majors go to bed at 8pm and play college football well enough to stay on the team as graduation requirements? I notice a lot of people who push for more foreign language in other programs are those who are good at learning languages and have the interest. It's really not that different than the linux evangelist who doesn't understand why joe gamer doesn't want to part with windows. Most of us don't have either the interest, time, or talent to specialize in whatever everyone else is specializing in. Forcing irrelevant interdependency prevents this specialization, which prevents maximum opportunity for talent to express itself.
I think if you have the interest, go right ahead and take them as electives (or even minor in them), but otherwise there's not enough of a correlation to justify foreign language academic dependencies on CS programs. Students majoring in liberal arts shouldn't have to learn how to handle memory addressing in motorola and arm assembler in order to get their degrees either. There are good programmers out there who have enough trouble with their native languages just like there are excellent linguists and translators who are 'hapless techno weenies.'
You're arguing from what you expect, rather than from data.
The number of Americans able to hold a conversation in a foreign language is about 25%. Which is nowhere near "Most Americans".
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182...
This is especially bad since about 17% of Americans are Hispanic. Not all Hispanics are bilingual, of course.
In the UK the bilingual rate is about 38%; in Ireland it's 34%, both higher than the US, despite your claims. Across the EU, it's 56%.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
It's understandable that English-speaking countries have lower rates, but even within English-speaking nations, the US is pretty near the bottom.
(Australia is right at the bottom.)
http://yourlanguage.org/resear...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
LOok here feller, evver buddy are a speshul bunkerfly, and desserts there diplomer just as mutch as u do. Kwit beeing an eleetist, u eelitist, u. Kwit triing to put roodblocks in there way, will u? Sumbunny shud call helth n humun servaces on yur ass.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.