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America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders (bard.edu)
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In her Bard College commencement speech, ex-Google VP and former U.S. CTO Megan Smith revealed to graduates that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code in 2014. "I walked into the Oval Office to do coding with President Obama, and, interestingly, Prince William had just stepped out," Smith explained (YouTube). "They had just had a meeting. I said to President Obama, you know what you and I are about to do is related to Prince William, and he said, how's that. Well, the Prince's wife Kate, her mother and grandmother were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where they cracked the Nazi Enigma codes...." [Presumably Smith meant to say Kate's great-aunt, not mother — Carole Middleton wasn't born until 1955.]
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
Former CTO? No wonder Google sucks.
Damn he's good!
I'm curious. Do any of you know if President Trump has learned to code? And if so, in which language would he work?
Since he's considered by many to be the highest-IQ president ever, I assume this would have been an easy task for him.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Andy Hertzfeld
Steve Capp
These two are historic programmers.
I don't know who came up with the event driven architecture, but these two led the way in making it mainstream.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Is that what used to be called software development?
There is no excuse for Googlers to not know computer history. The Computer History Museum is a couple of blocks away from the GooglePlex. Both the GooglePlex and CHM are in buildings that once belonged to Silicon Graphics.
Speaking of Ada Lovelace, the second implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine design #2 was on loan at CHM from 2008 to Jan 2016. Hand cranked, you know.
More like “quick to blame others” for her lack of knowledge.
Here’s what her blog post actually said: ”So much of world history leaves out or minimizes the contributions of women, and so “of course” most of us had no idea who she was.”
Good grief - I went to college in the 80s, and I knew who Ada Lovelace was. How much you want to bet Smith didn’t know about Bletchley Park in 2011, either?
In any case I’m sure Ms. Smith considers herself an expert in the field now, having likely spent several hours reading Wikipedia after her “embarrassingly clueless” European tour.
#DeleteChrome
"America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders"
What a heartwarming and deeply touching story!
Please EditorDavid, we need more nostalgia, less nitpicky geekery in our discussions.
...omphaloskepsis often...
"I haven't come across your face before."
LOL, heil Hitlary!
10 PRINT "Now I am a coder! Hail to the Chief!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Look, all women. No Kernighan, no Ritchie, no Thompson, no Turing, no men at all. And of course the first computer programmer is a woman, not the dude who built the fucking thing. Slashdot, this has to stop. The women you are catering to with these stories are not your audience. They already have their own web sites and only come here to salt the earth. Understand or wither away.
When the programming trade was appreciated and encouraged people to become Craftsman. Then outsourcing and contracting firms turned everything into churn and burn with real programming never to be seen again nor appreciated despite the fact that it was those people like the folks at DARPA that made all of this possible including Slashdot. Could you imagine what TCP/IP would have been if it were designed by H-1B Visas under corporate contracts?
We'll make great pets
I'm curious. Do any of you know if President Trump has learned to code? And if so, in which language would he work?
Since he's considered by many to be the highest-IQ president ever, I assume this would have been an easy task for him.
I know many very high IQ people who don't know the first thing about coding. Many scientists and college professors don't know even the basics, and some of the ones that do think making a spreadsheet equation is coding.
There's lots of easy tasks that people just don't get around to learning, or who don't find an immediate need for. I don't repair my own vehicle, for instance, even though many of the people at my local hackerspace think nothing of replacing brakes or fixing a blown head gasket.
To them, it's straightforward and anyone can do it. "Howcome you never learned to do this?"
It's the same with other skills like home wiring and plumbing. Many people shy away from doing electronics, while engineers at Hackaday can make complex electronics boards but can't program a microcontroller.
(Programming a microcontroller is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
I grew up helping my dad wire homes professionally, so electronics - even high-voltage electronics (that can kill) - doesn't scare me.
That's also a skill everyone should have - right?
(Home wiring is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
Trump has a lot of life accomplishments, so I don't think calling him down for not having learned coding is a particularly fruitful avenue for insults.
It's awful. Sloppy and inarticulate. TL;DR in the truest sense of the word.
HPFS was EPIC!
I believe that Lady Lovelace descends directly from George Gordon who we usually call Lord Byron. A bright family indeed !
>> CTO Megan Smith revealed ... that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code..
So he learnt to program in maybe half a day? Wow. Here I am, 35 years in, and still pretty sure I don't know everything...
Why? Cause no such thing as politican good will even exists. No politican from prehistoric kings to recent morons ever had such thing
Very impressive.
Well, in 2007 we learned that he was magical so I guess it's not a leap. I'm waiting to hear when he submits his first patch to the Linux kernel.
Maybe Obama's too busy using his new coding skills to hack his literary agent's computer to erase that part about Obama being born in Kenya (the item that lead Hillary's people in 2008 to start the "birther" movement, which was later adopted by Trump and SHAZAM became a racist thing which it clearly wasn't when it was started by H's people).
Of course this genius coder has now been exposed in a lie by the Justice Department's Inspector General report which lists Obama as one of 13 officials who exchanged messages with Hillary on her private e-mail server (something he denied knowing about on a TV interview). As a coder, he SURELY would have known that "clintonmail.com" was NOT a ".gov" account.
And then there's a related item: in 2016 Obama publicly said to Bill Clinton (DNC convention if I recall properly) that Hillary was smarter and far more qualified than either of them. Does she code? We certainly know she knows how to wipe a server... "what, with a CLOTH?"
I'm having fun here, but as a rule I actually DESPISE these stories where politicians (of ANY party) "learn to code" in a quick lesson - NO GEEK/NERD/ETC SHOULD TOLERATE THIS STUFF - it's an insult to the profession. Show me another profession that happily helps politicians and the media pretend that its skill can be mastered by any idiot in less than a day!
Being led by the hand through a 'coding' exercise by a former google exec does not impart any meaningful insights into computer programming for a sitting President, or for that matter a classroom full of school children using a printed recipe to make a ball 'bounce' on screen.
That Kate Middleton's grandmother and great-aunt, along with thousands of others, worked at Blechtly Hall (sp) while Alan Turing and friends built their special-purpose computer doesn't make everyone that worked there a 'code-breaker'. There were countless people that supported those doing the actual breaking of code, and while their contribution helped, I don't think the security guards, the cafeteria staff, the secretaries, administrators, transcribers, etc would consider themselves code breakers. Over 99% of the workers at Bletchley Park had no idea who Turing was and how he proposed to crack the enigma - most code-breakers were toiling away trying to break enigma manually, without the aid of Turing's machine.
Oh, and can we agree that the term 'coder' is saved for those people that actually can sit down at a computer and, using the language of their choose, write a program without pre-printed instructions to accomplish some task, no matter how trivial?
Walking into a kitchen and following the directions on the side of a frozen burrito doesn't qualify someone as a 'chef', following a code.org 'packet' doesn't make one a coder.
Ken
I think they officially dropped it one or two owners back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I really don't understand this current drive to teach everyone to code. You can successfully use a computer without needing to know how to code.
I drive my car daily....I don't need the skills of a mechanic to do so.
I use my body daily, though it is getting old and rickety lately....but I don't need to be a doctor to do so.
WTF is with this whole movement to teach everyone to code?