Yeah, but that has only just become an a-level.

It's the transferrable skills. You find if someone can speak a second language, they can pick up others easier. So if someone learns German, they can pick up French, Italian, whatever easier than someone who hasn't.

Well, how close are German and a programming language?

They both have semantics, they both have a grammar, they both have a syntax and a morphology.

Just because you are using it to communicate with a machine, doesn't mean it isn't another language.

Sure, they have a very different way of making a point. The use of words/punctuation/order of the language is very different.

By then so is every language.

The point I'm making is that this is about transferrable skills. If I have managed to learn a second language, then that shows I should be able to pick up another easily, wether it is French and Italian, or ASM and C++.

How often does one just add two number together? Not often. Does that make that skill useless? No. The skills you learnt from adding two numbers allowed you to add bigger numbers, add algebra, learn multiplication, etc, etc.

 

Don't compare programming languages with foreign languages. Foreign languages are far more complicated and in order to use them flawlessly you mustn't hold back onto formalities.
It's the complete opposite of programming language where the grammar and vocabulary are dead simple and small and the structures (data structures) that stem from them are the complicated ones.

I wouldn't compare them. Just for reference I speak Greek as a native language, English fluently, French with a certain ease, can understand a few Spanish and tried to learn Japanese for a year.
As for programming languages, I used Pascal for a year in highschool, C for a couple of years later and write in Matlab daily.

As a Greek speaker, learning French didn't help me learn English. The differences are just too great. But you, as an English speaker might be favoured by the step of learning a language that conjugates nouns, adjectives and verbs. Greek already does that. And I guess you could say that you had some friction with the process of learning a new language as well.

The only group that I will admit is very similar and have experienced personally is French-Italian-Spanish. Even the Portuguese aren't that similar to those three.

So it would be logical for an employer to require a specific language and that only.

 

I don't speak German, but I love the sound of it and the logic of it.

 

The way German sounds to me, is just like those mock-ups of a certain California ex-governor.

Terribly tongue entangling.

 

The way German sounds to me, is just like those mock-ups of a certain California ex-governor.

Terribly tongue entangling.

I have always liked long words, and German seems to be full of them.