To make the counter argument, it is rather unfortunate that the way foreign languages are normally taught in U.S. schools (grammar first to make it painful) leads to the cliche of “I took 4 years of French in high school and I can only speak very little.” On this line, make computer languages a foreign language, as schools do a poor job overall teaching a foreign language so that it can be truly acquired. The advantage of computer languages as a foreign language is that picking it up for the learner does not require the learner to deal with frustration and embarrassment in the context of interacting with other people, like they would learning to communicate in a foreign language.

> Within this subset of multilinguals who are well-versed in a non-English language, 89% acquired these skills in the childhood home, compared with 7% citing school as their main setting for language acquisition.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/13/learning-a-f...