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

Photoshop, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I request an image of Obama learning to code on healthcare.gov

Re:Photoshop, please!

[epyT-R]

If he can code, then he can fix healthcare.gov

Re: Photoshop, please!

[GodelEscherBlecch]

Went on it last week and it worked quite well and was a damn sight more informative and easy to use than the sites provided by my own insurance company / employer. Just sayin'.

Re:Photoshop, please!

[davide marney]

If he can code, then coding obviously isn't very hard; politicians generally aren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.

I never understood this passion for teaching people to code. Writing code is like drawing with crayons, language-wise. In fact, it's problem is that it is too simple, so simple that there are absolutely no ambiguities or shades of meaning. Normal language speakers have to train themselves to NOT think normally, in order to code well. It's like giving a painter 64 crayons and telling him or her to draw the Mona Lisa. Well, that's 3 strokes of Blue, 1 of Yellow, 2 of Green, 1 of Purple and a dash of Black, then Grey. There. That's the color of that shaded portion under her right thumb.

I've written two such "languages" of my own, and have learned about six more. I never found any of them particularly difficult. Programming is thinking. Thinking -- not coding -- is what's hard.

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.

How about teaching some of the Republicans

[rossdee]

what the internet actually is

Presidential Administrations Care About Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Give me a break

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Give me a break

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Hey guys, I learned how to dress a wound with my triangular bandage, I've obviously learned medicine.

I have a Black & Decker drill and a can of spackle.

I guess that makes me a dentist.

A long time ago, I was "given" a CS student to manage. I quickly noticed that he hated programming, so I asked him why he was studying CS. He answered: "Because of the money."

I really hate it, when politicians pop up, write a "Hello World!" one liner, and then claim that they can code. They don't understand what programming is all about, and want to dismiss it as a simple skill that anyone (H1Bs) can do. Just because you can speak a few words of English as a foreign language, that doesn't mean that you can write works of Shakespearean quality.

That, is what politicians don't get about programming. They don't understand it, so they want to dismiss it as something trivial.

Re:Give me a break

[AthanasiusKircher]

I really hate it, when politicians pop up, write a "Hello World!" one liner, and then claim that they can code.

Who has claimed that? Obama certainly didn't claim that -- the press release said he was "the first president to write a line of code." There's no claim that he became an expert or fluent -- he just participated in doing something that many people of his generation have never done. Because he thinks it's important, as he said:

Part of what we're realizing is that we're starting too late when it comes to making sure that our young people are familiar with not just how to play a video game, but how to create a video game.

And it wasn't David Cameron claiming he "learned to code" -- if anything it's the Microsoft press release that used that phrase. If you read the details, they say just that these politicians "had their first experience" of coding, not that they had somehow become an expert in an hour. If anything, the emphasis with Cameron was how much he learned from OTHER KIDS who had clearly invested more time in this stuff.

They don't understand what programming is all about, and want to dismiss it as a simple skill that anyone (H1Bs) can do. Just because you can speak a few words of English as a foreign language, that doesn't mean that you can write works of Shakespearean quality.

That, is what politicians don't get about programming. They don't understand it, so they want to dismiss it as something trivial.

Actually, it is the exact opposite. If you actually read what they're saying, they are trying to emphasize how important these sorts of skills are, and they are doing these "stunts" NOT to demonstrate that "I too can learn to code in an hour," but rather something like, "Hey -- parents and grandparents out there who may never have done anything like this -- look, it's important, and it's a good idea to expose your kids to it early. I'm taking time to show how important skills like this are by trying a little myself, even though I haven't done it before."

Now -- you can criticize various aspects of what they're doing. You could say that this is an ineffective way of getting their message across or that we don't need more kids familiar with coding (probably not true) or that there's a better way to demonstrate their commitment to this.

But the whole point of these things is politicians trying to emphasize the IMPORTANCE of coding to our society today -- even if older generations don't "get it." They're not "dismiss[ing] it as something trivial" -- they're trying to encourage kids and parents to take the time to try it. As the Microsoft story about Cameron ends:

the hope is that the Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial will have sparked an interest that lasts a lifetime.

It probably won't for the vast majority of kids, but it might create an interest in some. Maybe you have some better ideas about how to encourage this. But I don't think you can accuse the politicians here of claiming either (1) that they became experts in an hour or (2) that they are trying to dismiss these skills as overly simple. If anything, they are trying to point out how we need to get kids interested early because it is a HARD and IMPORTANT skill that can take a long time to learn.

He can't write math code

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mostly sure

[orpheus]

As a physician, I can tell you that every US medical student I've seen had to do/learn all the basic proctology tasks/diagnoses, and residents must learn the entire general range of proctology tasks/diagnoses. While most schools don't let a student do, say, full hands-on supervised colonoscopies for liability/inexperience/billing reasons, their residency will expect them to. A proctologist (as you term a board certified internist, with further training leading to a board subspecialty as a gastroenterologist) is an expert, there are no "proctology interns".

I say this as someone who feels US medical care suffers from our excessive (sub)specialization, at the expense of trained generalists.

As abusive as I feel the med school/residency system is, this is one part I agree with: any physician SHOULD have a thorough grounding.

And?

[jandersen]

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.

Re:And?

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

2: Learning a bit more and realising that writing a good program for a substantial project is actually hard

He hasn't even figured that out for law or government; he thinks he just decrees things and then they magically happen. When his code doesn't do what he wants, he probably complains that the CPU found "loopholes" in the instruction stream.

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?”