[Alex3917]

> I'd love to see the source you base that claim on.

Like the government's official data on adult literacy?

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF

After 1994 they got rid of the 'advanced' literacy ability category, corresponding to roughly the level academic journal articles are written at, because not enough Americans qualified. So currently the top literacy level is 'proficient', which is roughly the minimum level you'd need in order to teach yourself to become a competent developer. (That's basically the level you need to read a newspaper and compare and contrast the information presented in two different articles.)

[bovermyer]

First, thank you for providing a credible source.

However, linguistic constructs in most programming languages are not what I'd consider advanced English. A C++ program is hardly written in Shakespearean style, for example. And many words in programming languages do not exist in English per se; e.g., "def" from Python is not a word.

So, programming requires a more basic understanding of written English than you seem to imply.

[dragonwriter]

> However, linguistic constructs in most programming languages are not what I'd consider advanced English.

Linguistic constructs in most programming languages can be at least as complex as anything in English, and aren't even English at all. You know how many experienced programmers have trouble dealing with programming languages with, to them, unfamiliar syntax? To someone who hasn't programmed, all programming languages have unfamiliar syntax.

> So, programming requires a more basic understanding of written English than you seem to imply.

That doesn't follow from the premise that "linguistic constructs in most programming languages are not what I'd consider advanced English."

"Proficient" literacy (the current highest level) for each area of literacy is defined as follows (from the document provided upthread):

Prose literacy: reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences

Document literacy: integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing multiple pieces of information located in complex documents

Quantitative literacy: locating more abstract quantitative information and using it to solve multistep problems when the arithmetic operations are not easily inferred and the problems are more complex

I would argue that programming tends to require literacy at that level in each category of literacy in that least one natural language (the language in which information about the programming language, etc., and the problem domain is available), as well as the ability to develop the equivalent degree of literacy in the programming language. (This isn't necessarily a prerequisite to learning programming, and especially in the case of early programming exposure, I think programming is a useful context for achieving a proficient level of literacy in a natural language.)

[Alex3917]

Sure. But the most advanced level of literacy they're measuring is just being able to read a newspaper written at an 8th-grade reading level. And that's actually below the level of most programming tutorials. E.g. even reading the Django documentation, which is known for being unusually clear and well written, is still much more difficult than reading an NYT editorial.

[lloyd-christmas]

I have to seize the opportunity:

http://stanford.edu/~mkagen/codepoetryslam/

[serge2k]

How is that paragraph evidence of illiteracy?

[Alex3917]

> at the minimum you need to be able to read English at a proficient level