&gt; However, linguistic constructs in most programming languages are not what I&#x27;d consider advanced English.<p>Linguistic constructs in most programming languages can be at least as complex as anything in English, and aren&#x27;t even English at all. You know how many <i>experienced programmers</i> have trouble dealing with programming languages with, to them, unfamiliar syntax? To someone who hasn&#x27;t programmed, <i>all</i> programming languages have unfamiliar syntax.<p>&gt; So, programming requires a more basic understanding of written English than you seem to imply.<p>That doesn&#x27;t follow from the premise that &quot;linguistic constructs in most programming languages are not what I&#x27;d consider advanced English.&quot;<p>&quot;Proficient&quot; literacy (the current highest level) for each area of literacy is defined as follows (from the document provided upthread):<p>Prose literacy: reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences<p>Document literacy: integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing multiple pieces of
information located in complex documents<p>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<p>I would argue that programming tends to require literacy at that level in <i>each</i> 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), <i>as well as</i> the ability to develop the equivalent degree of literacy <i>in the programming language</i>. (This isn&#x27;t necessarily a prerequisite to learning programming, and <i>especially</i> in the case of early programming exposure, I think programming is a useful context for <i>achieving</i> a proficient level of literacy in a natural language.)