Among Malcolm Turnbull's first words as the newly elected leader of Australia's Liberal Party, and hence heading for the Prime Minister's job, were: "The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile, that is innovative, that is creative." And near the heart of the matter is the code literacy movement. This is a movement to introduce all schoolchildren to the concepts of coding computers, starting in primary school.
One full year after the computing curriculum was introduced by the British Government, a survey there found that six out of 10 parents wanted their kids to learn a computer language instead of French.
The language comparison is interesting because computer languages are, first and foremost, languages. They are analogous to the written versions of human languages but simpler, requiring expressions without ambiguity.
They have a defining grammar. They come with equivalent dictionaries of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs; with prepositions and phrase patterns, conjunctions, conditionals and clauses. Of course the dictionaries are less extensive than those of human languages, but the pattern-rendering nature of the grammars has much the same purpose.
Kids who code gain a good appreciation of computational thinking and logical thought that helps them develop good critical thinking skills. I've sometimes heard the term "language lawyer" used as a euphemism for a pedantic programmer. Code literacy is good for their life skills kit, never mind their career prospects.
