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Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program
- ojn 12y agoThat's a Chromebook he's doing it on! Acer 11" CB3.
- wyager 12y agoClearly most people are not going to spend a lot of time learning the rigorous theory behind CS, or how to write really high quality software that's meant to be reused. However, I suspect that coding will become the new literacy. It's becoming an essential life skill, but only a few people need to be really good at it; most people just need a basic functional knowledge.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hellbanner 12y agoWell, yes. But if you're unhappy with say, the way Facebook or email or Twitter works -- you may want to write your own. You might say "that's absurd, Twitter, Facebook and email aren't going anywhere!" -- but look at What's App or Snapchat or any other communication medium. There's always room for improvement. Most solutions might be awful but every attempt to improve a system carves more of a path for the next giant.
- spion 12y agoI'm hoping that once we have widespread coding literacy (if that happens), we wont have to write our own twitter. Instead services like twitter will provide various "extensibility points" where anyone would be able to inject their own code according to what they need. Sort of like Excel lets you do with macros, but friendlier to use and more pervasive.
- wyager 12y ago> What would a large fraction of the population need this skill for? Managing the rapidly increasing number of computerized systems. >our everyday systems are designed by an increasingly smaller group of people. What are you talking about? Open source is bigger than ever. There are more computer scientists than ever. I can't think of a context in which this statement is true.
- schoen 12y agoMaybe it could be interpreted as "the top 10 most widely used programs today were written by a population of programmers who are a smaller fraction of the population of users than has ever before been true before". (That might still not be true: the number of people who work as programmers at Facebook or Microsoft might well be growing much faster on average than the worldwide population of people who use the software they write!)
- Pro_bity 12y agoLiteracy too started by a small group of individuals making most of the content and having a near strangle-hold over communication. Then ask literacy expanded, so too did the communication, creativity and variety of content.
- hellbanner 12y ago"Program or be Programmed" -- great book. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgicuytCkoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgicuytCkoY . Full talk also on youtube, just search for it.
- aaron-lebo 12y agoI disagree. It is great if more people learn it, but it is nothing like literacy. The ability to read and write is something that can help you in every aspect of life, which is why a lot of people pick it up (they use it over and over again). Keep in mind even with this being the case functional literacy is often quite low for many people and true illiteracy is still an issue. Even math past basic arithmetic isn't well-developed, people simply don't use it, despite required schooling. Are computers everywhere and do people use them every day? Yes. But mechanical ability isn't the new literacy and just as many people interact with engines on a daily basis and would be helped by it in daily life. I think it is much more useful to think of programming like woodworking, leatherworking, sewing, soldering, etc. Very useful skills which can improve your life, but not at all necessary, and "only a few people only need to be really good at it" as you stated.
- GregBuchholz 12y agoI just finished the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert (creator of Logo) which would be a give you a good perspective on how computer programming literacy could be used to help people learn (about more than just computer programming). It is a great book that I'd recommend everyone read.
- untog 12y agoIMO it's somewhere in between. Not as important as writing and reading (after all, you wouldn't be able to code without that) but there are few opportunities in people's jobs to use leatherworking, soldering, etc. I have a lot of friends who work in offices surrounded by Excel spreadsheets all day. I know for a fact they would be more productive if they knew how to use it better, write macros, VBA... or heaven forbid, use a database instead. I think this is going to happen more often in the future, too.
- salgernon 12y agoI would be satisfied if people were simply able to identify tasks that can and should be automated. There are many, many, many people / organizations that have weekly or monthly manual tasks that could be automated if the individual or organization could recognize it - and hire someone to address the automation. Stupid alert: I briefly worked at a startup that did push to production by remote desktop to the server and manually restarting the IIS server after copying things into place. They didn't automate it - because "it's the way we always did it." (Yes, they're out of business now.)
- _RPM 12y agoHow is writing code becoming a "life skill"?
- lkbm 12y agoIn my non-tech job (basically school registrar), writing userscripts saves me a lot of time--in some extreme cases, it's allowed me to complete what for any of my coworkers would have been a week's worth of work in a few hours, and with far fewer mistakes. Regular expressions and basic Unix utils are also amazingly valuable in non-tech jobs that involve computer use. "Life skill"? Maybe not. Enormously valuable in bureaucratic jobs? Definitely.
- GuiA 12y agoIf all bureaucrats knew how to program, then we would only need a fraction of the bureaucrats we have now. What would they do? The point of bureaucracy is not to be efficient, it's to give jobs to people who otherwise would be flipping burgers or mopping floors, but are too educated for that. See hyper-bureaucratic countries like France for a vision of this. I'm on the side of basic income for everyone to avoid this problem and reclaim efficiency in administrative processes, but in our judeo-christian cultures not working is considered a bad thing®, and thus this idea has a hard time gaining traction.
- rayiner 12y agoBureaucracy is devilishly hard to automate. It's easy to have a guy who, say, approves house renovation plans (to use a hyper bureaucratic example). Writing software to process that? Pretty non-trivial AI problem. This is one of the lessons that keep cropping up when they try to automate say claims administration at the VA. Something that's only 90% automatable might as well be 0%.
- lkbm 12y agoOr, wow. Conspiracy theorize much? Is your assumption that businesses are thriving while wasting 10-30% of their revenue on busywork? If so, it should be trivial to crush them with your 10-30% reduction in overhead. Do it? Is your theory that regulations requiring hard-to-automate bureaocratic work is created with the sly intention of creating busywork for people? Ah, special interests. They can lead to some messed up stuff, but most regulations are put in by well-meaning people trying (often ineffectually) to do what they're actually stated to be for--enforcing safety, fairness, etc. I've regularly stated that I want most of my job automated away by Google, and we do have start-ups chipping away at old business models, but if it were entirely a matter of simply deciding to stop wasting money, I'm going to go out on a limb and say someone would've done it already.
- cgriswald 12y agoLet me disabuse you of that idea. :) Consider math. It's extremely useful and people need it to properly function in modern life. And yet people are not only terrible at it, but they are proud of how terrible they are at it. They believe (incorrectly) that math is something you "just get" and that it is not a skill that can be learned. To me, those people are illiterate, but the perceived social stigma of being math illiterate just isn't there like it is with actual illiteracy. So, if math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives of people isn't the new literacy, I don't think coding has a chance.
- baddox 12y agoOr, for a much more direct example, just plain old normal literacy.
- GregBuchholz 12y agoWhat do you think of "Mindstorms" (the book)? One of the themes of that book is that math education has failed most people because of the way it has been traditionally taught (see also Lockharts's Lament). But that computers could provide a new, better way at allowing people/children to learn though exploring simulations. I found it to be really quite the impressive work, and while I began my Logo investigations to teach my kids, I'm now also trying to track down some great looking Logo books from the long distant past, like "Turtle Geometry" by Harold Abelson for myself. Yes, that Abelson.
- Omniusaspirer 12y ago>math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives I think this statement is only accurate for basic math. Nearly everybody I've known has had a situation where they wanted to code something or wished they knew how. Math is almost the opposite, I've heard more complaints about wasting time on "useless math" than I've heard regret for not pursuing it more. That's not to say they're right, but it's absolutely a strong opinion I've heard from a huge range of people. I do disagree with the premise of coding being the new literature though (as defined by >99% of the population). Any point where that percentage is reached will be one where programming looks nothing like it does today and has been abstracted to a meaningless level.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- keithwarren 12y agoI expect a publication like Wired to be able to distinguish between writing code and writing a 'computer program'. If this is the bar then I wrote my first 'program' when I was in 3rd grade in the 80s doing LOGO. Don't get me wrong, making programming a core competency is a novel goal and everyone should do it like everyone should do some chemistry in high school or do a physics project (I for one built an awesome bridge of balsa wood). It is an important skill that people should be exposed to at some point but the idea everyone should 'learn' to do it is a misnomer.
- Totient 12y agoI agree. It would be nice if everyone was exposed to programming, just to get a feel for what is possible/plausible - plus the benefits of learning how to think through a problem logically. But just as I don't consider someone fatally unknowledgeable about biology if they can't quite remember what, say, the liver does, I don't consider someone fatally unknowledgeable if they don't know how to write a computer program. It would be nice if everyone tried programming at some point, but the idea that everyone should know how to is kind of silly.
- __david__ 12y ago> I expect a publication like Wired to be able to distinguish between writing code and writing a 'computer program'. If this is the bar then I wrote my first 'program' when I was in 3rd grade in the 80s doing LOGO. Of course you did. Why isn't your 3rd grade logo code a program? Even "Hello world" is a program!
- daveslash 12y agoI wrote my first program when I programmed the radio in my parents car to change the station. I reached out, turned the knob, and instructed the machine what to do via instructions that are understandable to "human beings". Programming is easy. Bitter sarcasm put aside, I have often, existentially, wondered "what is programming?" The word "programming" obviously carries a lot of colloquial meaning, but I'd be interested in hearing where others draw the line between programming and, er..., data entry.
- jaybuff 12y agoHe implemented bubble sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8
- xasos 12y agoAt least he knows it's not the best way to sort 1,000,000 32-bit integers
- mikkelewis 12y ago"we have some spies", funny :)
- whoisthemachine 12y agoha funny in a kind of sad but true way.
- curiously 12y ago5 years later, not so funny.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI've always loved that video, knew immediately what it was going to be before I clicked it :)
- sloanesturz 12y agoBut did he use Vim or Emacs?!
- haney 12y agoCome on, he's not going to get mixed up in those politics...
- Igglyboo 12y agoHe used nano.
- mojoe 12y ago"Ed is the standard text editor." https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
- faizmokhtar 12y agoObviously vim. duh.
- hoodoof 12y agoIs it open source? Maybe we should fork it and turn it into a bigger project. "President's work gets forked".
- jacalata 12y agoJust like he already did to RomneyCare.
- monochromatic 12y agoYawn.
- pbiggar 12y agoA little dissappointed they didn't link to the code. Here's Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Hour of Code work: http://studio.code.org/sh/32532000 http://studio.code.org/sh/32532000 (http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/39544-wit2014 http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/39544-wit2014)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fjarlq 12y agoThe source can be seen by using the "How It Works" button.
- comrh 12y agoHere it is: > moveForward(100); https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-one-line-JavaScript-that-president-Obama-wrote-as-part-of-the-Hour-of-Code-2014 https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-one-line-JavaScript-that-...
- niix 12y agoHe must support the "use semi-colons in javascript" camp.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoGood on him, he's already using best practises.
- shultays 12y agoThat is quite good actually
- Aloha 12y agoI wouldnt be surprised if a president had written VBA before. Excel is everywhere.
- empthought 12y agoYour candidates are Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The youngest one graduated from school in 1991, and none of them are accountants or scientists. I'm thinking not.
- turbulents 12y agoBush did get his MBA from Harvard... in the 70s.
- jonstewart 12y agoJimmy Carter's probably too old, but fast-forward him a few decades and he probably would have.
- Steko 12y agoHelping their kids with homework, you never know.
- coldtea 12y agoAs if they help their kids, and not an army of nannies...
- joshdick 12y agoBill Clinton was the first president to send an e-mail. He sent exactly two e-mails during his eight years in office.
- finishingmove 12y agoNext up: PutinOS
- eccstartup 12y agoThat encourages programmers to become a president.
- fiatmoney 12y agoHow will programmers preside unless they have role models to look up to?
- eccstartup 12y agoNews transfer via internet, so the programmers have the chance to show their image more than the others. Furthermore, there is no limit(I guess) what job is a job to become a president.
- mkramlich 12y agoI like the inverse challenge: let's try to replace as much of government as we can with software/hardware. And the simpler, cheaper and more open, the better. Not even kidding. I'm already confident I can replace most/all of the IRS, Treasury, and all the welfare/safety-net type programs with fairly simple, hard-to-abuse software/hardware system. Given that the laws were significantly different and simplified. (And snowball's chance in Hell they'd allow that. Although there are alternate law/tax/welfare configurations which are both physically possible and theoretically sustainable.)
- saraid216 12y agoLess talk, more action.
- vertex-four 12y agoAnd I'm confident I can write a program to solve world hunger. Provided that we re-define solving world hunger to mean something simpler.
- mkramlich 12y agothat's rude. shame on you. that type of comment is too common on HN. poisons the community
- Maxious 12y agoOnly 15 years since the first president to send an email! http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-first-us-presidential-email-auctioned-60667-222031.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-...
- phkahler 12y agoBummer: "It was a very simple program—all it does is draw a square on a screen—but that’s the point, says Hadi Partovi" I don't want lawmakers that think imperative programming is all there is to it. That seems to be how they make laws - if you don't like something make it illegal, if you like something offer incentives. They never try to create a simple system with a more emergent behavior.
- mfisher87 12y agoIs there an editor on staff at Wired? >Obama wrote his code part of event today organized by Code.org, which brought brought 20 middle school students from the South Seventeenth Street School in Newark, New Jersey, to the White House, where they met the president and worked on Hour of Code tutorials. >Last year, Obama delivered a YouTube speech last year[...]
- downandout 12y agoAre these fluff pieces even worth editing?
- Natsu 12y agoSurprisingly, yes. Scott Dadich @sdadich EDITOR IN CHIEF Mark McClusky @markmcc EDITOR, WIRED.COM http://www.wired.com/2013/03/wired-staff/ http://www.wired.com/2013/03/wired-staff/
- uptown 12y agoBloomberg never learned to code, despite his tweet.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- eibrahim 12y agoThat explains what happened to healthcare.gov
- dmak 12y agoI would like to see his code in github
- sebastianavina 12y agoI guess it's something like this: drawline(0,0,0,1) drawline(0,1,1,1) drawline(1,1,1,0) drawline(1,0,0,0) and here we are crazy of his great achievment.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- downandout 12y agoIt's somewhat amazing how far, in 2014, people can get without any tech expertise at all. It's not just Obama and other prominent politicians. There are countless incredibly successful business people that are lucky to turn on a computer. When I was barely out of high school, I briefly consulted for a guy that had built a net worth in excess of $100 million from scratch with a very successful chain of auto body shops. I was first introduced to him after his son told me that a few days prior, his father's computer came up with a message box saying that a program had "performed an illegal operation". He yanked the power cord out of the wall and began contemplating what he would say to the police when they came. Last year, Steve Wynn, billionaire casino mogul, was accused of threatening the life of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis via email over a $2 million gambling debt. Steve won a defamation lawsuit, with his primary argument being that he couldn't possibly have done it because he had never sent an email in his life. While technology is an integral part of our world, the most crucial skill for leaders isn't being able to code or necessarily even operate it. It's being able to identify what needs to be done, then building and managing teams that can get things done. If you can do that, you can accomplish almost anything.
- Thriptic 12y ago> It's somewhat amazing how far, in 2014, people can get without any tech expertise at all. It's not just Obama and other prominent politicians. There are countless incredibly successful business people that are lucky to turn on a computer. I know of a CEO of a major American company that has his secretary print out all of his hundreds of daily emails and manually sort them for him. He then dictates his replies into a dictaphone and has her type them out.
- Istof 12y agoI hope this is not true and that other presidents gave it a go.
- godgod 12y agoObama's first computer program has only 3 main functions; serial_liar(), taxandspend(), and blamerepublicans()
- godgod 12y agoObama's first computer program has 3 main functions; serial_liar(), taxandspend(), and blamerepublicans()
- rbanffy 12y agoI can almost bet Angela Merkel has written some FORTRAN code before entering politics. Her job is, however, "Chancellor".
- nandemo 12y agoThe president of Estonia, Toomas Ilves, can code. > Ilves moved to Leonia, a borough of 9,000 people a short trip over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, when he was three years old. He grew up there and learned computer programming at Leonia High School. Ilves graduated as valedictorian in 1972 and went on to receive degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. (...) Ilves credits the programming classes he took at Leonia High School with his work to turn Estonia from a country that essentially had no communications infrastructure after independence to what is now a European Silicon Valley of sorts. The most notable example? Skype was created in Estonia. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/09/03/estonias-president-came-to-tallinn-by-way-of-the-jersey-turnpike/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/09...
- IndianAstronaut 12y agoEstonia is moving forward quite a bit on getting people to learn to code. Much better efforts than what we are doing in the US.
- meritt 12y agoI bet his inbox is already filled with tech recruiter spam.
- cozuya 12y agoHe drew a square on a screen? UI developer position now open.
- mkopinsky 12y agoHe drew a square on a screen? "I'd like to introduce you to a fast-paced global-initiative multipowered startup looking for a full-stack Rails on Ruby rockstar." (I actually had a guy yesterday try to recruit me for this company, working on "dot JS node".)
- erickhill 12y agoGore woulda coulda shoulda been the first. But let's not go there... He definitely got the internet thing, too.
- karmacondon 12y agoThis is actually a big deal. Obama's code wasn't very useful or complicated but that obviously wasn't the point. The point here was that a 53 year old african american man sat down and learned to write a program, any program. It's much more unlikely than it sounds. Do you know what it would take to convince my mother to write a program that draws a square on a screen? We're talking moving heaven and earth here. If I suggest booking tickets on expedia instead of calling her travel agent she's like "What am I, some kind of nerd?" Obama is leading by example. He and his biggest supporters are people who never in their lives imagined that they would ever write a computer program or anything close to it. There's a cultural barrier that's hard for most of us to see, a clear demarcation between most people's daily lives and the idea of writing even the simplest program. Crossing that barrier is hard, real hard, and I am surprised and encouraged that Obama took the plunge. Code literacy is important, not so that the average person can become a 10X engineer but so that they can understand what's happening in the world around them on another level. It's the same reason that people should learn physics or chemistry or biology. Because these processes control our world and a basic understanding of them, even if we don't use it professionally, can help give people valuable context. Hopefully this kicks off more interest in learning the basics so that in ten years the sales guy won't think that coding a full featured CRM from scratch will take you a couple of hours over the weekend. We're moving toward a more automated world and the value of understanding it is increasing exponentially.
- droopybuns 12y agoI disagree. "moveForward(100);" A publicity stunt should not be confused with a tectonic shift in technology literacy or usability. Big deal- no. It's quaint, cute and frankly, a little pandering.
- cafard 12y agoI don't quite see the pandering, but yes it is a stunt. Should we expect him to join up with PETA because he pardons a turkey once a year?
- droopybuns 12y ago
- adamio 12y agoThis is the first step towards outsourcing the presidency
- sw00 12y agoUnderrated comment.
- dnautics 12y agoYou don't suppose jimmy carter wrote code? He was a nuclear engineer.
- pknerd 12y agoHmm..hope he will be using his night time to write open source code rather than thinking of war policies that don't work.
- richardjordan 12y ago10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 GOTO GUANTANAMO BAY
- binarnosp 12y ago> "everyone should learn how to code" Why not "Everyone should learn how to fix a broken pipe" or "Everyone should learn how to cook" or whatever? Here is mine: "everyone should follow his own passions"
- babl-yc 12y agoI'd assume the majority of modern workers are behind a computer all or at least some of the day, and chances are part of their job is repetitive and could be automated. Having the ability to build software for those tasks, or at least recognize what could be automated, would be very beneficial. I don't see how learning to fix a broken pipe would be as globally applicable.
- bruceboughton 12y agoEveryone should ignore my advice.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- BerislavLopac 12y agoI have a feeling that moveForward(100) might become a new meme... ;-)
- mkopinsky 12y agoHe is a progressive politician, is he not?
- JackTheBlack 12y agoWhen we started to learn robotics, our first assignment was to teach the robot to draw a square. Its actually a good "hello world" exercise: http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io