I got out of taking any languages classes in college because Computer Science classes (of which I took exactly one, Pascal) satisfied the requirement. It’s fucking rubbish to imagine learning a programming language is anything like learning a real human language. If there is any similarity at all, it’s like learning Esperanto.
I would agree that using CS as a way to not take a foreign language is some utter bullshit. The reason I compare it to linguistics, not a language, is that most of coding seems to be figuring out the correct syntax to tell the machine what you actually want it to do. There’s actually very little in the way of mathematics, or even arithmetic, in CS, so I find the widespread comparison to be less than helpful.
I got out of taking any languages classes in college because Computer Science classes (of which I took exactly one, Pascal) satisfied the requirement. It’s fucking rubbish to imagine learning a programming language is anything like learning a real human language. If there is any similarity at all, it’s like learning Esperanto.
I would agree that using CS as a way to not take a foreign language is some utter bullshit. The reason I compare it to linguistics, not a language, is that most of coding seems to be figuring out the correct syntax to tell the machine what you actually want it to do. There’s actually very little in the way of mathematics, or even arithmetic, in CS, so I find the widespread comparison to be less than helpful.