I have to agree with him, bluemagic. I can't say that my 2+ years of high school programming were any kind of waste of time, even if I did develop such an aversion to the subject after a brush with machine language that I never truly recovered my love of coding...
it's still the case that I used that information more over the next 30 years than anything else that I learned in that building. Well, maybe old-school Personal Finance, which was (at the time) a state requirement. Wisely so, IME.
I also took 3 years of high school French, and several years of college German, and neither thing did much to make me fluent by any stretch of the imagination.
On the other hand, a few weeks on the ground with Quebecoise or Parisians surrounding me does wonders.
My DD has found a lot more use for her HTML than she has for her Greman, that's for sure-- and she's got that linguist gene that I lack, so her fluency is pretty great given her level of exposure. She also picked up French at a rate that was flatly kind of astonishing once she landed in an immersion setting-- with no instruction at all.
