If a proposal given by Florida lawmakers passes, students will be allowed to take classes in programming languages as an alternative to two required foreign language classes. A bill's sponsor, senator Jeremy Ring said that programming is a "global language today". This initiative may be the part of growing trend about teaching coding to American students, with President Obama last weekend unveiling a $4.2 billion plan to expand computer science education, which he said had become "a basic skill, right along with the three ‘R’s" — reading, writing, and arithmetic. http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology...-to-learn-coding-instead-of-foreign-languages Cool idea, but it would be even better if it's "in addition", not "instead" IMHO.
Programming is not a language - that's a metaphorical use of the term. Used to be that this proposal involved math, so that math (a "global language") was proposed as an alternative to another language. That didn't work either. Languages are in the wheelhouse of human mental capability - we talk, read, write, better than we do almost anything else. Any substitute for an actual language will involve a simplification, a loss of complexity.
A number of universities here in the United States already do the same thing and have for many years. It was a popular curricular change in the 1990's. When they have foreign language requirements, at the undergraduate or graduate level, they will sometimes allow suitable knowledge of computer programming to substitute for suitable knowledge of a natural language. That usually depends on the major, it has to be something where facility with computer programming is more relevant than a foreign language.
