Linked In – Igor Perisic
“Recently I read about an educational movement in the United States that would allow high-school students to fulfill their foreign language requirements by taking programing classes. As a Software Engineer, I am certainly supportive of efforts to expand technical learning opportunities for kids and to better prepare them for today’s economic realities. But, this latest attempt is, in my opinion, misguided. The whole problem is rooted in the abuse of the key term, language. In foreign languages the term language refers to “the system of words or signs that people use to express thoughts and feelings to each other” (Merriam-Webster) while in programming languages the term language means “a formal system of signs and symbols including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions“ (Merriam-Webster). To equate foreign languages with programming languages reduces learning a foreign language to the mere acquisition of a set of tokens or words that are semantically and syntactically glued together. It fundamentally ignores the societal, cultural and historical aspects of human languages.”(more)