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It’d be great to learn about other code by prominent politicians. Off the top of my head, I only recall one other example: COBOL on Wheelchair [0], a web micro
by nathell 5y ago
It’d be great to learn about other code by prominent politicians.
Off the top of my head, I only recall one other example: COBOL on Wheelchair [0], a web micro-framework for GNU COBOL, written by Adrian Zandberg [1], a Polish MP.
[0]: https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg
- imron 5y agoThomas Massie https://mobile.twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1082457242966913024 https://mobile.twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1082457242...
- boredumb 5y agoThis is actually quite cool, I figured someone bugged him about a github or something and I scrolled down to see.... twitter has to be dangerously close to 100% comprised of political propaganda bots repeating the talking point of the week and calling one another bots these days.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoAudrey Tang is a minister in the Taiwanese government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://metacpan.org/author/AUDREYT https://metacpan.org/author/AUDREYT (And of course she is the initiator of the PUGS Perl 6 implementation project)
- charlieyu1 5y agoHer article on 500 lines or less is a great read.
- dolmen 5y agoI recommend to listen to her interview by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa on his Rebuild.fm podcast: "Monads Are Not Required For My Job" (June 2020) https://rebuild.fm/271/ https://rebuild.fm/271/
- fsh 5y agoAngela Merkel's dissertation lists five programs she wrote for various physical chemistry calculations. Two ran on an HP 9810A, two on the east German Robotron EC1055 mainframe, and one on the Soviet BESM6 mainframe. Maybe the listings are still on a shelf somewhere.
- throwaway2037 5y agoHat tip on this post! I found her PhD thesis online here: https://vdocuments.net/reader/full/angela-merkel-doktorarbeit https://vdocuments.net/reader/full/angela-merkel-doktorarbei... Scroll down to page 150: "Anhang A1: Das Programm FPROJ". Google translate tells me that "Anhang" means "Appendix" in German. I will not soon forget the term "das programm". I must admit: You nerd sniped me good on this one!
- dagw 5y agoFormer US Senate and Presidential hopeful and anti-vax poster child Herman Cain had a bachelors in mathematics, a masters in computer science and wrote ballistics software for the US Navy. Although he never actually succeeded in holding elected office, so I don't know if he really counts.
- mohn 5y agoAdding on in this vein: I'm curious if the late Presidential hopeful Ross Perot wrote any noteworthy software, or if his role in tech was only that of a salesman. He's another case of not winning the races for elected office, but 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 and a fortune of approximately $4 billion in 2019 is nothing to sneeze at.
- adventured 5y agoHe was an IBM salesman after the Navy and prior to founding EDS, it's very unlikely he ever wrote any software. I've read a fair bit about him over my lifetime and have never run across a mention of him being technically inclined, an engineer, writing software, etc. He understood how the IT services industry worked - from his time on the inside of it at IBM - and saw an opportunity. He likely had a good salesman's grasp of the structure of the industry technologically (what was selling, what wasn't; who dominated what segments; what companies were spending on various segments). He got started from spotting a market inefficiency that IBM wasn't interested in pursuing (leasing unused compute time), so Perot formed EDS and the rest is history.
- trollied 5y agoBoris Johnson is great at brainfuck
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoHe does speak it as a native.
- sereja 5y agoLeonid Volkov, a Russian oppositionist and the chief of staff of Alexei Navalny's 2018 campaign. The Russian government wants to arrest him for being a key member of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which it brands as "extremist" (he fled to Lithuania, along with others). He got an ICPC bronze medal in 2001, and before getting into politics, he was at an IT company for about 10 years, working his way up from a software engineer to the CEO. The company now has 9k employees and $200M revenue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Volkov_(politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Volkov_(politician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corruption_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corruption_Foundation
- rabite 5y ago[flagged]
- throwaway48375 5y agoI'm not sure that Pravda is a reliable source.
- SXX 5y agoThis is bullshit from Putins propoganda. He is nationalist and have a specific positions on immigration, but it doesn't make him extremist.
- bitcharmer 5y agoYou're comment is so obvious propaganda it's actually funny. Give our best to whoever's paying you for this low quality BS and tell them to try harder.
- pessimizer 5y agoConsider my comment propaganda too, then. The only major difference that Navalny has politically with Putin is that he wants his job.
- 5y ago
- dom96 5y agoThat's really cool, but COBOL on wheelchair sounds kinda offensive, seems risky for a politician.
- pzduniak 5y ago1. His political party is on the fringes of the left, advocating for very high taxation (reaching 55% at income >= $63k/yr, 75% at >= $125k) - this combined with the general Polish lack of trust towards politicians (and our ~20-ish% total income tax loopholes) practically guarantees that they won't ever get any real power. 2. Current government openly admitted to spying on the opposition and introduced an anti-abortion law that already killed a couple women, as hospitals decide to play it safe and wait until the fetus dies. And they dismantled the separation of powers. And probably already stole hundreds of millions of dollars, with independent investigations confirming at least tens. Our politics are so messed up that absolutely no one will bat an eye at a 7 years old non-PC joke.
- throwaway2037 5y agoRead question: I am baffled by the democracy situation in Poland. How can the situation be explained to outsiders? When I was a child in the United States, Lech Wałęsa regularly celebrated as a hero by helping to lead Poland into democracy as head of the trade union Solidarity/Solidarność. I always felt he was "Une Hacker Originale" by forming a worker's union in a (nominally) Communist state! It was like they back-doored a democratic institution into a unfree state. Amazing stuff to read about.
- ed_balls 5y ago> was "Une Hacker Originale" by forming a worker's union in a (nominally) Communist state nah he was just a puppet/poster boy for a good story. The real reason why communism fail in Poland were: - coup d'etat by deep state. General Kiszczak did an excellent job. System has changed without a bloody revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Kiszczak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Kiszczak - communism was inefficient. Trading barier made it worse. As a result Soviet Union was weak and didn't have enough influence to keep the system stable. - Kissinger managed to convince China to counter Soviet Union. In 1969 they had to throw and enormous resources at the border.
- twic 5y agoBulgaria's minister of e-governance: https://techblog.bozho.net/i-have-been-appointed-as-e-governance-minister-of-bulgaria/ https://techblog.bozho.net/i-have-been-appointed-as-e-govern... is a top Stack Overflow contributor: https://stackoverflow.com/users/203907/bozho https://stackoverflow.com/users/203907/bozho as well as a moderately active HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bozho https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bozho
- throwaway2037 5y agoHoly crap! This is amazing. I have lost count how many times I have read amazing, thoughtful answers authored by him on StackOverflow.com! I think he has even answered some of my own questions... I wish him good luck!
- nathell 5y agoThis is great! Previous HN discussion on him becoming a minister: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540771
- lostlogin 5y agoYour comment led me to this gem from antman: Lets remember his answer on stackexchange regarding how many Greeks pay high taxes vs Greek owners of Porshe Cayennes, when he not recognized and was asked for references for his figures: "Hi, can you provider references for your figures? - Skiiv The figures come directly from SQL queries I executed on the General Secreteriat for Information Systems database.... – Diomidis Spinellis" https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6883 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550277
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoThat is Diomidis Spinellis, a Greek politician, not the Bulgarian minister.
- jeff_vader 5y agoAh this reminds COBOLUnit[1]. I'm still not sure if it's a joke or not. [1]: https://sites.google.com/site/cobolunit/home https://sites.google.com/site/cobolunit/home
- moron4hire 5y agoWhy would it be a joke?
- jeff_vader 5y agoLook at the logo. Looks like a play on Cobol being "ancient" technology and unit testing being something "hipster".
- moron4hire 5y agoI read it more like self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor.
- throwaway2037 5y agoI did a double take when I read your comment, but the more I think about it: You are right. Assuming this is not a joke, it is probably a good idea! There must be lots of legacy software from 60s/70s/80s that runs on mainframes for gov't/military/banks/insurance. It won't be replaced, but it would great to add tests when making changes to code. Edit: Great HN username!
- TMWNN 5y ago>There must be lots of legacy software from 60s/70s/80s that runs on mainframes for gov't/military/banks/insurance. It won't be replaced, but it would great to add tests when making changes to code. Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky describes in some detail the job position of programmer archaeologist (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology>). Set thousands of years in the future, such archaeologists search archives going back to the early days of Unix for useful code.
- chkuendig 5y agoWordtris ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordtris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordtris ) was developed by Armen Sarkissian - the current president of Armenia
- dnautics 5y agoholy crap I played that game two decades ago.
- kingcharles 5y agoI vote Josh Wardle for US President!
- adw 5y agoHe’s British, so that’d require some dramatic geopolitical developments!
- rossriley 5y agoYet the current British prime minister was born in the US, we need some reciprocity here.
- blululu 5y agoAmerica being a former colony illegalized this possibility 230 years ago. The British being the the former global superpower lack such laws and they will thus eventually be ruled by a foreigner with an Oxbridge education.
- imadethis 5y agoFormer president, actually. He resigned about a week ago unexpectedly.
- 0xBABAD00C 5y agoFollowing a scandal revealing he's secretly a citizen of St. Kitts & Nevis. Can't make this up...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway4good 5y agoOur prime minister is really active on Facebook, does that count?
- gyc 5y agoBeto O’Rourke, former U.S. Congressman, was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-politics-beto-orourke/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
- ZetaZero 5y agoIf only Bill Gates would run for office. What a code legacy he would have...
- TMWNN 5y agoJohn Poindexter (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter>), Reagan's National Security Advisor: * First in his Naval Academy class * PhD from Caltech * Reached flag rank After leaving office because of the Iran-Contra scandal (during which Poindexter reportedly set up a secret communications channel on the IBM PROFS system the NSC used), Poindexter became a software developer!