Why President Obama Was Held Back a Year Before Starting Code School (quora.com)

theodp writes: Microsoft is boasting that UK Prime Minister David Cameron learned to code during this year's Hour of Code thanks to its Minecraft-themed tutorial, much like US President Barack Obama learned to code during 2014's Hour of Code thanks to Disney's Frozen Princess-themed tutorial. Interestingly, according to a recent Quora post by Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, plans to have President Obama 'learn to code' a year earlier were torpedoed by the Healthcare.gov debacle. "We launched the first Hour of Code campaign, in 2013," explains Partovi. "We launched the first Hour of Code on the home page of Google, in every Apple Store, and we had convinced the President to issue a speech about computer science. But it was impossible to get the president to actually write any code that year — the administration had just launched its Healthcare.gov website, and after the infamous technical failures, nobody wanted the visual of website failing while the President is learning to code."

Comments

That other forgotten coding language...

[nightcats]

I have spent roughly a third of my life these past 2 decades or so among folks who code professionally, but there is one language that seems to have been avoided or repressed in the rush toward a society of coders. Paradoxically or not, I have found that those who really understand computer languages are often the ones who most value this other, rather moribund language:

True story from about a decade ago: I was sitting around a lunchroom table with a group of Indian tech workers. A new person had just arrived from our company’s office in Chennai, India, and he was getting acquainted with the “onshore” staff. Their way of breaking the ice was to go around the table, each man telling his name, position, and language(s). The web developer would introduce himself and say, ” I am Anand, I specialize in XML, javascript, CSS” The systems administrator would then chime in with something like “Ravi, I work in UNIX, Powershell, Perl” And so on it went, around the table, six or eight guys with varying skills and responsibilities. Finally it was my turn. I smiled and said, “I’m Brian Donohue, I work in the QA area and I also do some technical writing, and my language isoh damn itEnglish?”

Re:Photoshop, please!

[GodelEscherBlecch]

You obviously disagree that it was a good idea, but passing the ACA even in it's neutered net state was not 'optics'. You can't have it both ways - he can't be both tyrant and useless poster boy, machiavellian villain and idiot at the same time. You are free to disagree with his actions, but to deny that he has performed any just makes you look ignorant. I despise Dick Cheney, but I will never deny that he was a smart guy who knew how to put a plan in action. Maybe next time try arguing the merit of your counterpoints to his policies instead of trotting out this tired BS.