Программирование как второй язык

So, I was in class at the beginning of my junior year and we were getting ready to start learning a new language and as my teacher explained some of the ins and outs in the basic structure of the language I had this flashback moment to two years earlier when I was in French one. Except at this time I wasn’t learning French. I was sitting in game programming in web applications at the Miami Valley Career-Tech Center and we were getting ready to start learning C++. I realized that everything that we were learning it was the same as when I had taken French. So, I decided to look more into it. And it turns out that programming languages function nearly the same as the languages that we would normally think of.
I can draw parallels between almost every part of speech and a part of programming. In English you would have nouns, persons, things. In programming you have literals. 10 that means 10. Pronouns, words that replace nouns. In programming you have variables and verbs as any action operators that you can use. Above the parts of speech, you also have punctuation which is just as important in programming as it is in English. In English if you drop a comma you can go from a nice family dinner to cannibalism, which isn’t fun. In programming if you drop a bracket or a comma or a semicolon, your program could completely fail or worse it could do something that you don’t expect it to do.
So I saw this and realized that the structure is nearly perfect and I looked more into it and I found a study done by some researchers in Texas that took a selection of students studying Java and ran an FMRI scan while they interpreted a small snippet of Java code and found that there were five main activities, main areas of activity. Brodmann areas 6, 21, 40, 44 and 47. Of these five three of them - arears 21, 44 and 47 are all known language processing centers. So not only is the structure the same but the brain interprets programming in a very similar way. But with all of these in most schools in America and across the world you can’t take programming and get a language credit for it.
Before I moved to the Miami Valley CTC, I had six periods a day. Of those six periods four of them were core classes – Math, Science, English and Social studies. We also had to take a full year of Gym, a half year of Health and a half year of a Fine Art and three years of a foreign language or two years of two different foreign languages. This leaves two or three open periods, two of them in your senior year. That’s not enough time to get enough experience in programming to really delve into it and discover all of its capabilities. But if you were able to take a programming-lit class as a foreign language, suddenly now you have six spots to take a programming class. This opens up the opportunity for people who might not have sought out programming classes to take the class. When they look at their scheduling paper, I don’t really want to take French or Spanish but programming with Java looks cool.
So, they take it, discover that they have an aptitude for it that they like doing it, pursue that through high school and college and then they come out of college and that person makes some important contribution to the world of technology. They never would have made that contribution had they not been given the opportunity to take the class in the first place.
The purpose of education is to prepare students to be successful contributing members of society and as technology becomes more omnipresent, students need to be able to utilize that technology to the best of its ability. And if education isn’t doing that, it’s not doing its job. Now I said almost every school because in Florida, New Mexico and Kentucky there have been attempts to pass legislation to support programming as a foreign language. Those three states failed but Texas and Oklahoma didn’t. In Oklahoma students are required to take two years of a foreign language or two units of a computer programming or other computer related field and in Taxes at the end of the summer of 2017 they passed legislation to account for programming and other cyber security related fields in the foreign language credit.
These states are going to see a major increase in the number of students coming out of their educational systems into the world of tech. Because they have the pathways for it.
Now this idea goes even farther back than just the last few years. It goes back as much as 40 years ago when my grandfather, the man who really got me into programming was in his junior year of high school. He was given the opportunity really late in his junior year to take his classes at Penn State University for his senior year of high school. So, they rushed through his application and they discovered that he hadn’t taken a foreign language which was a requirement for acceptance to Penn State. He was able to work with a professor at Penn State and proved to the admissions department that because of the wealth of programming languages that he knew that was enough proof to waive the requirement under the special conditions.
So, if 40 years ago Penn State saw the opportunity for programming to count or at least be enough proof that he didn’t need the classes, in 2018 I think it’s time that we look at the educational system and start opening up the doors for people to be successful in the world of tomorrow. Thank you!

Перевод
Итак, я был на занятии в начале первого курса, и мы готовились начать изучать новый язык, и, когда преподаватель объяснил некоторые подробности касательно базовой структуры языка, я вспомнил времена двухлетней давности, когда я посещал занятия по французскому. Вот только в то время французский я не учил, а сидел за программированием игр в веб-приложениях в Центре карьерных технологий Майами-Вэлли (MVCTC), и мы готовились начать изучать язык программирования C++. Я понял, что алгоритм, по которому нас учили, был таким же, как и при изучении французского. Поэтому я решил разобраться в этом подробнее. И оказывается, что языки программирования функционируют почти так же, как языки, о которых мы обычно думаем.
Я могу провести параллели практически между каждой частью речи и частями программирования. В английском языке есть существительное, лицо и т.д. В программировании - литеральные константы. 10 означает 10. Местоимения, слова, заменяющие существительные. В программировании есть переменные и команды, которые вы можете использовать в качестве любых операторов действий. Помимо частей речи, у вас также есть пунктуация, которая также важна как в программировании, как и в английском