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.

Comments

Not the same thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:BASICally my reply is...

[nathan s]

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.