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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."
I request an image of Obama learning to code on healthcare.gov
what the internet actually is
Every administration tries to orchestrate their "message." Unfortunately, they let it happen in ways that undermine their own goals. The system is designed to reward those who best manipulate the media. When I see other nations sliding toward American style campaigns, I wince. One of the side effects is that the campaigning never ends.
Hey guys, I learned how to dress a wound with my triangular bandage, I've obviously learned medicine.
Obama didn't learn to code, neither did that useless twat Cameron. This is all stupid publicity garbage to make leaders look like they're "hands on", but I doubt either one of them could write a program worth anything. This is just insulting to the men and women who have spent thousands of hours gaining the skills.
"go to see the new Star Wars film, after which we will be told that he is fully qualified to fly the Millenium Falcon"\
At least as qualified as Peter Mayhew and Harrison Ford
because he only knows division. His code can't be debugged, because every function has a race condition. He can't write C++ because only the protected classes matter. And none of the classes are allowed to be friends. And he wants to penalize inheritance.
Politics never has a single agenda for their "messages" to the public, there are many. We know that people don't want to pay a living wage to US Citizens to code. This is why companies like Microsoft (mentioned in TFA so not picking on them) push like hell for more Visas and Green Cards, more deregulation on moving projects overseas (including DOD work which is expressly prohibited by law, but lobbyists have been working that for 15 years), and of course more people who can "code" to reduce the market value of people who do code.
Oh I know the rhetoric. "Everyone should because", and "If you can't you don't deserve to work in IT" which is fine. We need Doctors and Nurses, mechanics and welders, farmers and chefs, etc..etc.. Most people in Engineering and Architecture don't learn how to "code" anything worth while ever, but some do some impressive stuff. Most MDs don't code at all and don't need to code.
What the Hour of Code teaches is drag and drop logic puzzles, not coding. I'd have less problems with it if they were at least honest about what it is and what it's for.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Learning to code meaningfully in an hour would be like learning calculus in an hour. It's not gonna happen. Stop with the gimmicks. Obama and Cameron can't code.
I seriously doubt Cameron learned to code. He can barely do cohesive thought processes. There is no word I'm allowed to type that would get through this firewall that describes his complete and utter inability to do anything remotely good for the people he is supposed to serve and represent.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Sadly it's happened in the UK with televised "debates" becoming a thing in recent years.
So the guy who has the job of running the country didn't have time to participate in some stupid dog-and-pony farce because he was too busy running the country? And that was two years ago?
Yeah, that's news that matters.
Also, quora are spamming invasive bastards.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Anybody who is moderately intelligent and understands the idea of doing one thing after another is able to learn how to carry out the basics of coding. I think most of my generation learned to write code by picking up whichever manual was at hand, reading it and then try to work out how to solve some small problem; it took me an afternoon to get started, and I can't imagine it would take anybody else longer, really. What is missing is the word 'well'; any idiot can learn to string instructions together, as I thought when I heard about Cameron learning it, but doing it well is another matter altogether.
It falls in three phases, I think:
1: Learning that coding consists of writing simple instructions and thinking "Oh, it that all it is?"
2: Learning a bit more and realising that writing a good program for a substantial project is actually hard
3: Building up years of experience and eventually becoming good
Regrettably, a lot of people never progress past 1; and unfortunately a lot of them are managers, who then think that they are equipped to make decisions about the subject.
Your president is ridiculously powerful compared to those of most other western democracies.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
Most other Western democracies have a Prime Minister, with a separate Head of State (usually a President or monarch). The US system sort of combines the two positions.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ah, came here to say the same thing. 20 years learning the ins and outs of this shit. And now you're telling me that everything I've learned, starting with procedural, then object-oriented, functional, aspect-oriented, etc can be learned in an hour?!
Not only that. Has he done a Linux from Scratch? Does he know how to put an operating system together?
I don't know. "I can't even" only begins to describe it.
Get out of tech. Just leave. I've encountered these same attitudes at my current job. "Oh hay, this person said, 'I wanna be a programmer!' so just train them!" I've been accused of sexism because this shit can't be learned in a one hour session every week in under, I don't know, the heat death of the universe.
Then I have to deal with a passive-aggressive airhead Millennial who's convinced I'm sexist and racist solely because of my assigned gender at birth!
I want to bring Countess Lovelace and Rear Admiral Hopper forward through time so that they can bitch-slap these assholes. I mean, are you kidding? Lovelace would give these assholes who go Everyone Can Code, You Sexist Cis Het Male! a hell of a tongue lashing. Have you read her Notes? I'm sure Hopper would be glad to strangle them with a nanosecond or two. Yeah, get me a time machine, I don't care if it's a phone booth-type or internal combustion-type, I'll go get them, and then we can listen to what they have to say about Everyone Can Code!
Does Obama or Cameron even fucking understand what Lovelace wrote in her Notes?!
Flipping burgers sounds like a better career at this point.
I don't really see what is so bad about the optics of a decision maker learning a little something about the work involved in accomplishing the objectives that person is supposed to be making decisions about.
Healthcare reform was a big part of the presidential agenda, major parts of that included digitizing records and building a large computerized exchange. I am generally one of the presidents harsher critics, but I would have looked favorably upon him actually trying to learn something about the nuts and bolts of what he was doing. Personally I would rather have seen him sitting in rose garden reading a book on actuarial sciences, than learning python but..
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So, I'm really confused about this. My left-wing friends on facebook all assured us (repeatedly) that healthcare.gov was working just fine and it was just a right-wing conspiracy theory that there were any problems. Was there actually a technical failure? Surely not.
Do you have ESP?
I've spent the last 20 years learning everything from transistor-level CPU and GPU architecture to the gory innards of ring-0 drivers and parsers for C++ code. But today I learned that this knowledge base can be learnt in a day.
This is fantastic news! Over the last few hours I have been reading an article on the web about brain surgery. By tomorrow at this time, I shall be a fully qualified brain surgeon! The day after that, I aim to become a 777 pilot, and the following one, a master chef. After that, I might spend Wednesday becoming a master painter.
I love this new world!
You'd need these skills in order to remain relevant in the changing job markets
Have gnu, will travel.
Well he gave it a try but he had the damnedest time getting the turtle to move.
That would be because in a parliamentary democracy, the president is usually a mostly ceremonial position. You should be comparing the US president to the prime minister of most western democracies.
I've known several brilliant computer scientists that don't really enjoy programming--there was a time when computer science was more than memorizing idiosyncratic template meta-programming syntax.
One for the IDE, and the other for the teleprompter so he knows what to type.
Yeah that voter manipulation trick has has been imported to India from K Street with some enhancements and is wreaking havoc here. We now we have a genocidal fundamentalist running the country with a perfectly astroturfed social media based campaign. For example, he circulated a false jpeg on WhatsApp claiming that Julian Assange says Modi is incorruptible. This was happening at a time when social media had just hit critical mass in India, e.g. the average 40+ year old citizen and the middle class had just moved to smartphones that display HTML properly. So perfectly astroturfed that he got a stadium literally astroturfed just so that searching 'modi astroturf' doesn't turn people to anybody talking about the ruling party's deceptive campaign. The government is spending huge amounts on tailored suits, pointless public addresses and inconsequential foreign visits that do nothing except create a cult of personality around Modi. Public schools where kids don't even have benches or books were rented high-end video equipment just so they could see Modi's swearing-in ceremony. Hindu fundamentalists have been given his silent assent, and if a muslim was caught with beef and murdered for it (which happened recently), there would be no action by the authorities or acknowledgement by the government. The first time Modi addressed religiously motivated killings of muslims in India was to the BBC on a visit to England, a month after the fact. Imagine if POTUS did that after a mass public shooting. You all in America have a duty to protect your country from the likes of Trump, Cruz and Fiorina by going to the voting booths and voting. Heck, even Bush and Hillary look good in comparison to them.
Back when George Bush--the idiot who couldn't walk and breathe at the same time, the goofball who only got elected because of his Daddy, etc.--somehow managed to trick a large number of the Democrats in Congress to support his Iraq war.
If Bush was somehow able to scheme up a lie that convinced John Kerry and Hillary Clinton (among others) to vote for the Iraq war, how stupid could he be? Or for that matter if Kerry and Clinton were duped by the simpleton Bush, how can we take anything the say or do seriously either?
How appropriate.
You provided a single example, I provided an example from the other side. Neither of those sides is one I've voted for, but I found it quite hilarious a the time that so many self-proclaimed "most intelligent people in in the room" claimed later to have been duped by someone they repeatedly named a dunce.
Cheney may have been the brains behind the puppet, but that's not what those Dems said at the time or since, really, because "Bush lied! People died!" is such a nice bumper-sticker itself, and you can't fit "Bush stupidly repeated lies fed to him by Cheney and Democrats were so easily distracted that they voted for a war that they would later repudiate with 'I was for the war before I was against it' and endlessly blame Bush for any and all problems that might ever follow! People died!" on a bumper sticker.
If you start by limiting your thinking to procedural ...
I don't think that really is at the heart of the problem - 'procedural' is just a tool, and it has it its place, certainly. But to make a good engineer, you have to start with a 'problem', something you want to solve, and choose your tools to fit the problem. The problem with managers who tink they have understaood it all is that they then think we 'just do' ... and then they go out and buy a tool that can 'just do...' whatever. Like, if you are a team of builders working on a new house - imagine the manager going out to buy this new, amazing electric drill and insisting that it is used not just to make holes, but also screw in screws and cut timber, which it could be made to do; but on top of that, he also wants it to dig holes and make the coffee, and if you can't, he'll tell you that you're imcompetent.
That's great! I am appreciative that the president now knows about what I have done for a living the last 42 years. It looks like googling "US CONSTITUTION TUTORIAL" that there are some things of more immediate value.