A Senate committee Thursday approved a bill aimed at allowing high-school students to take computer-coding classes as an alternative to learning more-traditional foreign languages.

One candidate language would be Python, it’s freely available and one of the easier programming languages to learn – compared, say, to C/C++.

Duolingo is a visually appealing language learning app disguised as a series of fun games that slowly get more challenging.

Sanjeev Khudanpur tells this story: When IBM was making mainframe computers in the 1960s, an idea took hold. The idea was that if computers could be taught to process language— human spoken English, ...