Slashdot Mirror
White House Touts Obama's 1-Liner as 2014 Tech Highlight
theodp (442580) writes That President Obama became the first President to write a line of code (as a top Microsoft lobbyist looked on) is #1 on the White House's Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014. To kick off this year's Hour of Code, the President 'learned to code' by moving a Disney Princess Elsa character 100 pixels on a screen, first by dragging-and-dropping Blockly puzzle pieces and then by coding 1 line of JavaScript. Interestingly, Bill Clinton might have been The First President To Write Code had Microsoft seen fit to use its patented, circa-1995 Graphical Programming System and Method for Enabling a Person to Learn Text-Based Programming — which describes how kids as young as 8-12 years of age can be taught to program by progressing from creating a program using graphical objects to doing so using text-based programming — to teach President Clinton to code some 20 years ago!
This is not a Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014, as curated by the White House. This is a Top 9 science and technology highlights that happened at the White House.
Big difference.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
That would be such an appropriate first line of code for the POTUS, in so many ways.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Back in the day, this used to be a popular first programming exercise:
10 PRINT "RADIO SHACK SUCKS!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
I wonder if we could get more kids to code if there was still a simple programming language that sped up trolling for lulz at the mall?
Clinton could have used LOGO's turtle to draw the first presidential digital dick pic
Don't get too hard on them, after all it's aimed at +8 years old children. It's kinda reassuring that at least someone at the WH who could run through it.
Just because it's a slow news day, it doesn't follow that you have to post any old non-news just to keep the clicks going. Is there nothing interesting going on in science, technology, space, or other nerdy topics?
It's a symbolic gesture. I doubt that many people expect the president to learn programming while in office. They have many other affairs to take care of.
He did the widget-moving, but he also really wrote a real line of JavaScript.
Actually yeah, that is writing a line of code. It's calling a function, it's one line and incredibly simple, but so is this:
print("Fuck you.")
Python3 no less. Are you actually brainless enough to argue that because someone else taught him how to do it, it's not coding? That's a level of narcissism that's rare even for low ID lusers on Slashdot. I'm guessing if you program at all, you do so because you either were taught to do so or read tutorials written by someone else...yet according to your own rules, that would mean you're not a programmer at all.
10 print "You, jason777, are a self-important twit."
20 goto 10
" it's aimed at +8 years old children. "
So, Congress? I assume you're referring to mental, not physical, age.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We don't need our presidents to know how to code, or to be scientists. We do need them to appreciate that coding and science are important, listen to the experts and encourage general public to do the same. I'll take one line of Javascript over "I am not a scientist" excuses right away.
It's a symbolic gesture. I doubt that many people expect the president to learn programming while in office. They have many other affairs to take care of.
You must be thinking of Bill Clinton...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.