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NYC Mayor Bloomberg Vows To Learn To Code In 2012

Posted by timothy on from the give-himself-a-fighting-chance dept.

theodp writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to take a coding class in 2012 via Twitter ('My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me.'). So, is this just a PR coup for Codeacademy, or could EE grad (Johns Hopkins, '64) Bloomberg — who parlayed the $10 million severance he received after being fired as head of systems development at Solomon Brothers into his $19.5 billion Bloomberg L.P. fortune — actually not know how to program? Seems unlikely, but if so, perhaps Bloomberg should just apply to be a Bloomberg Summer 2012 Software Development intern — smart money says he'd get the gig!"

6 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Cobol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe he wants to know how to code in something besides cobol and fortran.

    1. Re:Cobol by zarlino · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The MBA's still think you can describe a piece of software in Word, and then it's a trivial process to make the software that customers want. Informal language is desirable to humans because it supports leaving out details - which is exactly what makes it useless for programming a computer.

      That's because software *is* the description of what the computer should do. Check this great article: http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation

      --
      Check out my cross-platform apps
  2. He was never a programmer by tomalpha · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mike Bloomberg was always the business/sales guy at the company. Tom Secunda was (one of the) original programmer of the first terminals. That was all in Fortran back then. A fair chunk of it probably still is. You can read this and oh so much more in his not-very-gripping autobiography, which was required reading for all team leads and managers at Bloomberg. [Ex Bloomberger].

  3. Why was this mod'ed "Funny"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you look at just about all tech companies, the person who got it going was the sales guy. In some cases the tech guy is also a great salesman - Larry Ellison of Oracle or Zuckerberg of Facebook - actually, FB is just a marketing data collection company.

    In my years in software development, I've seen some really great ideas and implementations just get burried because the geek didn't know how to sell it's value.

    All the tech bigshots knew how or knew someone who knew how to sell the value of their stuff.

    Wozniak had the luck of having God's gift of salesmenship, Steve Jobs, as his friend. All the gazillionaire techies had someone with them that had the contacts and sales ability to take their idea and make it into something.

    "Build a better mousetrap and the World will beat a path to your door" is a lie. The countless examples of inferior technology ruling the marketplace is proof.

  4. My first program by jacobsm · · Score: 5, Funny

    10 Print "I've got lots of money"
    20 goto 10
    30 end

  5. Re:Fortran & COBOL are ok... apk by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Informative

    Should I use COBOL or ForTran (Formula Translator)?

    No, it's "FORTRAN". While it does indeed stand for "formula translator", back in those days they didn't use CamelCase, and making portmanteaus and then writing them in all caps was normal. You can still see it in US military acronyms, such as "USCENTCOM" (US Central Command).

    According to Wikipedia, they didn't start using camelcase for programming language names until the 1970s, and it only became fashionable for company names in the 80s.