Legislation that will allow foreign language requirements to be fulfilled by computer programming courses was passed through the Kentucky senate on Feb. 1. Supporters considered it a step toward preparing students for a job market with a high demand for programming jobs.

Senior Cody Cree, who has taken four years of Spanish as well as a computer programming class, thinks computer programming can be just as important and useful as learning a foreign language.

“Computer code is universal,” he said. “Even though foreign language is great, it doesn’t help if there isn’t a high concentration of that language in a certain area.”

According to the Computing Research Association, there has been an 8.5 percent increase in students majoring in computer science, but overall national statistics show that less than 2.4 percent of college students graduate with a computer science degree.

“I think the technological field would be helped out a lot by this legislation,” Cree said. “On the other hand, I don’t think the linguistics field would be affected too much because the people who want to go into those fields will still be taking foreign language classes.”

Latin teacher Kyle Drugan believes the same legislation may be passed in Texas.

“I’m not entirely happy about it,” he said. “I’m concerned it may affect the number of foreign language classes.”

Freshman Latin student Zachary Rickman had a more humorous take on the possibilities of the legislation.

“I think this is a really good idea,” he said. “It’ll come in handy when the robots take over.”