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!

Comments

Summary is misleading

[bondsbw]

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.

Hello World!

[Irate Engineer]

That would be such an appropriate first line of code for the POTUS, in so many ways.

Retail griefing circa 1984

[greg1104]

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?