Slate – Valerie Woolard
“Legislators in Florida have put forth a bill that would encourage high school students to take computer science classes by allowing them to earn foreign language credits after obtaining technical certifications. While their goals are laudable, their execution is flawed. As a recent Vox article pointed out, programming languages are completely different from natural languages. Computers and the code that powers them are literal, emotionless, strict, and free of nuance or ambiguity. Human language is anything but. This is not to say that code cannot be artful, clever, and beautiful, but to think of learning code as a substitute for learning a second language completely misunderstands the point of learning both coding and foreign languages in the first place.”(more)