bioinformatics

Is computer code a new foreign language?

Babies were born to release crying signal to express themselves to the new world. Since practicing several simple words and phrases from their mother tongues, they even have learnt to control and command the surroundings. With more complicated sentences listening from their parents, they can communicate their own needs to solve the real-life questions.

Coming back to the header question- Is computer code a new foreign language? Same to remember each new word, program learners (PLs) have to be familiar with different data types: numbers, strings, lists, dictionaries; same to use common phases, PLs shall frequently take notes of the commonly used function packages, such as NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, OS in Python; same to express your logics when speaking to others, PLs will bear in mind of logical operators, control flow and loops usages. Besides, same to your real life needs of listening (e.g., Podcast), reading (e.g., Harry Potter series books), speaking (e.g., seminar talk) and writing (e.g., thesis) in a foreign language, coding is to solve the specific Bioinformatics questions.

When people start writing, they read some classical literatures to gain writing skills and inspirations. It was said that the American writer Mark Twain used to brushing up Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard's Almanack to gain inspiration in humor. If you agree with the point, and the great writer was even doing so, better to prepare yourself with codes (e.g., PEP style code) from some brilliant coding writers to acquire inspirations while coding (using a foreign language).