Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/obama-becomes-first-president-write-computer-program/

by keithba • 12 years ago

265 145 12 years ago

wyager• 12 years ago

Clearly most people are not going to spend a lot of time learning the rigorous theory behind CS, or how to write really high quality software that's meant to be reused.

However, I suspect that coding will become the new literacy. It's becoming an essential life skill, but only a few people need to be really good at it; most people just need a basic functional knowledge.

hellbanner• 12 years ago

"Program or be Programmed" -- great book. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgicuytCkoY . Full talk also on youtube, just search for it.

aaron-lebo• 12 years ago

I disagree. It is great if more people learn it, but it is nothing like literacy. The ability to read and write is something that can help you in every aspect of life, which is why a lot of people pick it up (they use it over and over again). Keep in mind even with this being the case functional literacy is often quite low for many people and true illiteracy is still an issue. Even math past basic arithmetic isn't well-developed, people simply don't use it, despite required schooling.

Are computers everywhere and do people use them every day? Yes. But mechanical ability isn't the new literacy and just as many people interact with engines on a daily basis and would be helped by it in daily life. I think it is much more useful to think of programming like woodworking, leatherworking, sewing, soldering, etc. Very useful skills which can improve your life, but not at all necessary, and "only a few people only need to be really good at it" as you stated.

GregBuchholz3• 12 years ago

I just finished the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert (creator of Logo) which would be a give you a good perspective on how computer programming literacy could be used to help people learn (about more than just computer programming). It is a great book that I'd recommend everyone read.

untog• 12 years ago

IMO it's somewhere in between. Not as important as writing and reading (after all, you wouldn't be able to code without that) but there are few opportunities in people's jobs to use leatherworking, soldering, etc.

I have a lot of friends who work in offices surrounded by Excel spreadsheets all day. I know for a fact they would be more productive if they knew how to use it better, write macros, VBA... or heaven forbid, use a database instead. I think this is going to happen more often in the future, too.

salgernon• 12 years ago

I would be satisfied if people were simply able to identify tasks that can and should be automated. There are many, many, many people / organizations that have weekly or monthly manual tasks that could be automated if the individual or organization could recognize it - and hire someone to address the automation.

Stupid alert: I briefly worked at a startup that did push to production by remote desktop to the server and manually restarting the IIS server after copying things into place. They didn't automate it - because "it's the way we always did it." (Yes, they're out of business now.)

Retric• 12 years ago

There are a lot of tools out there like Excel that become significantly more useful with a little programming skill. World of Warcraft is a perfect example where the ability to create even simple macros is useful for a wide swath of people. Granted it's not nearly as important as reading, but it's probably on par with writing well. A core skill that's useful in most areas even if it's irrelevant professionally it's still useful at a personal level.

lmkg• 12 years ago

I think the development of programming literacy will mirror the development of literacy.

Literacy itself used to be a niche skill, learned by a select few who made an earning from it (scribes, criers), while the majority of craftsman got along just fine without it. Then the printing press came along, and it brought a proliferation of readable material, and literacy became useful. Not essential, but useful. People could distribute political literature, or send messages cheaply. Literacy bloomed. And as literacy increased, and became expected, it became essential.

We're at the beginning stage of that now. Somewhere around (probably before) the printing press. Programming literacy is becoming useful, but not yet essential.

curun1r2• 12 years ago

I agree with the original poster. Until now, when coding intersects with other fields, the approach has been for someone skilled in coding to come up-to-speed on whatever field needs automation. In the course of my career, I've had to learn to basically be an appraiser, employee benefits broker, pharmacist, dentist and auto mechanic. And while I learned a lot about these fields, there's no way that I can know these fields as in-depth as someone trained to do that actual work. This pattern is unsustainable and leads to software that is superficial and never truly meets the needs of the domain. But as we create more and more abstractions between programmers and the underlying hardware, coding will become more accessible to people with less background in software development and the desired balance between domain knowledge and programming knowledge will shift away from coding ability.

There will always be a need for people who understand computer science, but those engineers will be like compiler engineers or hardware engineers are today...enabling a much larger group of programmers to produce the software that provides value to users. And as we're able to provide improved layers of abstraction to make software development easier, we'll see computing become more accessible to more programmers who will build software with a much richer understanding of the domain.

So I'm torn about initiatives like this. I see coding as the new literacy...it will be a skill required by almost every professional who is an expert in his or her domain. But they won't be coding in today's languages and coding will be significantly easier than it is today. So we need to find a way to teach children to develop using tomorrow's tools today. And that means extracting the part of programming in today's languages that is intrinsic to programming while doing our best to avoid the part of coding that is just pain inflicted by today's limited abstractions. That separation may be difficult (or even impossible) to achieve, but that doesn't mean we should try. Because anyone who doesn't learn how to instruct a computer to accomplish tasks is going to be automated out of a job (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

saraid2162• 12 years ago

By this measure, everyone would be competent with statistics.

_RPM• 12 years ago

How is writing code becoming a "life skill"?

lkbm2• 12 years ago

In my non-tech job (basically school registrar), writing userscripts saves me a lot of time--in some extreme cases, it's allowed me to complete what for any of my coworkers would have been a week's worth of work in a few hours, and with far fewer mistakes.

Regular expressions and basic Unix utils are also amazingly valuable in non-tech jobs that involve computer use.

"Life skill"? Maybe not. Enormously valuable in bureaucratic jobs? Definitely.

cgriswald• 12 years ago

Let me disabuse you of that idea. :)

Consider math. It's extremely useful and people need it to properly function in modern life. And yet people are not only terrible at it, but they are proud of how terrible they are at it. They believe (incorrectly) that math is something you "just get" and that it is not a skill that can be learned. To me, those people are illiterate, but the perceived social stigma of being math illiterate just isn't there like it is with actual illiteracy.

So, if math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives of people isn't the new literacy, I don't think coding has a chance.

baddox• 12 years ago

Or, for a much more direct example, just plain old normal literacy.

GregBuchholz3• 12 years ago

What do you think of "Mindstorms" (the book)? One of the themes of that book is that math education has failed most people because of the way it has been traditionally taught (see also Lockharts's Lament). But that computers could provide a new, better way at allowing people/children to learn though exploring simulations. I found it to be really quite the impressive work, and while I began my Logo investigations to teach my kids, I'm now also trying to track down some great looking Logo books from the long distant past, like "Turtle Geometry" by Harold Abelson for myself. Yes, that Abelson.

Omniusaspirer• 12 years ago

math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives

I think this statement is only accurate for basic math. Nearly everybody I've known has had a situation where they wanted to code something or wished they knew how. Math is almost the opposite, I've heard more complaints about wasting time on "useless math" than I've heard regret for not pursuing it more. That's not to say they're right, but it's absolutely a strong opinion I've heard from a huge range of people.

I do disagree with the premise of coding being the new literature though (as defined by >99% of the population). Any point where that percentage is reached will be one where programming looks nothing like it does today and has been abstracted to a meaningless level.

meowface2• 12 years ago

Math is elegant and very useful, but let's face it, for the vast majority of people in the world all math beyond arithmetic serves almost no use. In comparison, programming of any kind can be useful to anyone if they know enough to help automate work tasks, for example.

keithwarren• 12 years ago

I expect a publication like Wired to be able to distinguish between writing code and writing a 'computer program'. If this is the bar then I wrote my first 'program' when I was in 3rd grade in the 80s doing LOGO.

Don't get me wrong, making programming a core competency is a novel goal and everyone should do it like everyone should do some chemistry in high school or do a physics project (I for one built an awesome bridge of balsa wood). It is an important skill that people should be exposed to at some point but the idea everyone should 'learn' to do it is a misnomer.

Totient• 12 years ago

I agree. It would be nice if everyone was exposed to programming, just to get a feel for what is possible/plausible - plus the benefits of learning how to think through a problem logically.

But just as I don't consider someone fatally unknowledgeable about biology if they can't quite remember what, say, the liver does, I don't consider someone fatally unknowledgeable if they don't know how to write a computer program.

It would be nice if everyone tried programming at some point, but the idea that everyone should know how to is kind of silly.

__david__• 12 years ago

I expect a publication like Wired to be able to distinguish between writing code and writing a 'computer program'. If this is the bar then I wrote my first 'program' when I was in 3rd grade in the 80s doing LOGO.

Of course you did. Why isn't your 3rd grade logo code a program? Even "Hello world" is a program!

daveslash2• 12 years ago

I wrote my first program when I programmed the radio in my parents car to change the station. I reached out, turned the knob, and instructed the machine what to do via instructions that are understandable to "human beings". Programming is easy.

Bitter sarcasm put aside, I have often, existentially, wondered "what is programming?" The word "programming" obviously carries a lot of colloquial meaning, but I'd be interested in hearing where others draw the line between programming and, er..., data entry.

jaybuff• 12 years ago

He implemented bubble sort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8

xasos• 12 years ago

At least he knows it's not the best way to sort 1,000,000 32-bit integers

mikkelewis• 12 years ago

"we have some spies", funny :)

whoisthemachine• 12 years ago

ha funny in a kind of sad but true way.

curiously• 12 years ago

5 years later, not so funny.

Igglyboo2• 12 years ago

I've always loved that video, knew immediately what it was going to be before I clicked it :)

sloanesturz• 12 years ago

But did he use Vim or Emacs?!

haney• 12 years ago

Come on, he's not going to get mixed up in those politics...

akiselev2• 12 years ago

You never know, Goldman Sachs might be a staunch emacs shop.

Igglyboo2• 12 years ago

He used nano.

mojoe• 12 years ago

"Ed is the standard text editor."

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

faizmokhtar• 12 years ago

Obviously vim. duh.

hoodoof• 12 years ago

Is it open source?

Maybe we should fork it and turn it into a bigger project.

"President's work gets forked".

jacalata• 12 years ago

Just like he already did to RomneyCare.

monochromatic• 12 years ago

Yawn.

pbiggar• 12 years ago

A little dissappointed they didn't link to the code. Here's Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Hour of Code work:

http://studio.code.org/sh/32532000

(http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/39544-wit2014)

comrh• 12 years ago

Here it is:

moveForward(100);

https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-one-line-JavaScript-that-...

niix• 12 years ago

He must support the "use semi-colons in javascript" camp.

shultays• 12 years ago

That is quite good actually

Aloha• 12 years ago

I wouldnt be surprised if a president had written VBA before. Excel is everywhere.

empthought2• 12 years ago

Your candidates are Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The youngest one graduated from school in 1991, and none of them are accountants or scientists.

I'm thinking not.

turbulents• 12 years ago

Bush did get his MBA from Harvard... in the 70s.

jonstewart• 12 years ago

Jimmy Carter's probably too old, but fast-forward him a few decades and he probably would have.

Steko• 12 years ago

Helping their kids with homework, you never know.

joshdick• 12 years ago

Bill Clinton was the first president to send an e-mail.

He sent exactly two e-mails during his eight years in office.

finishingmove• 12 years ago

Next up: PutinOS

eccstartup2• 12 years ago

That encourages programmers to become a president.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

How will programmers preside unless they have role models to look up to?

eccstartup2• 12 years ago

News transfer via internet, so the programmers have the chance to show their image more than the others. Furthermore, there is no limit(I guess) what job is a job to become a president.

mkramlich3• 12 years ago

I like the inverse challenge: let's try to replace as much of government as we can with software/hardware. And the simpler, cheaper and more open, the better.

Not even kidding.

I'm already confident I can replace most/all of the IRS, Treasury, and all the welfare/safety-net type programs with fairly simple, hard-to-abuse software/hardware system. Given that the laws were significantly different and simplified. (And snowball's chance in Hell they'd allow that. Although there are alternate law/tax/welfare configurations which are both physically possible and theoretically sustainable.)

saraid2162• 12 years ago

Less talk, more action.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

And I'm confident I can write a program to solve world hunger. Provided that we re-define solving world hunger to mean something simpler.

devonkim• 12 years ago

That's what half the IT BPM projects in government are billed as. Most fail for multitudes of reasons beyond the simple fact that technology projects in public sector are by default failures and ironically due in some measure to the incredible mountain of red tape originally designed to make risk transparent and manageable. There is no way in hell I'd let the current standards of technology in government anywhere near any form of decision making besides providing some crunched data points, which alongside DARPA style R&D is really the only example of tech in government I can cite that's had a solid history of successes. Half of the beltway bandits offer some bullshit Big Data solution after their CEO looks at a Hadoop program and the dollars spent on Big Bullshit Data by enterprise so they can keep their company relevant in passing, heaven help us all when we try to get them to build anything vaguely resembling recommenders and expeet systems.

normloman• 12 years ago

You're overconfident. Replacing massive institutions overnight is a recipe for chaos. What we have now is not perfect, but it works. Within days of instituting your system, there could be a catastrophic oversight that causes mass unrest. Gradual change is far less risky.

Programmers love rewriting things from scratch. But experienced programmers know it's often better to see what can be salvaged.

ojn• 12 years ago

That's a Chromebook he's doing it on! Acer 11" CB3.

Maxious• 12 years ago

Only 15 years since the first president to send an email! http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-...

phkahler• 12 years ago

Bummer: "It was a very simple program—all it does is draw a square on a screen—but that’s the point, says Hadi Partovi" I don't want lawmakers that think imperative programming is all there is to it. That seems to be how they make laws - if you don't like something make it illegal, if you like something offer incentives. They never try to create a simple system with a more emergent behavior.

mfisher87• 12 years ago

Is there an editor on staff at Wired?

Obama wrote his code part of event today organized by Code.org, which brought brought 20 middle school students from the South Seventeenth Street School in Newark, New Jersey, to the White House, where they met the president and worked on Hour of Code tutorials.
Last year, Obama delivered a YouTube speech last year[...]

downandout2• 12 years ago

Are these fluff pieces even worth editing?

akira2501• 12 years ago

If they're worth printing under your masthead, then yes.

remarkEon• 12 years ago

If it's not worth editing, is it worth printing?

Natsu• 12 years ago

Surprisingly, yes.

Scott Dadich @sdadich EDITOR IN CHIEF

Mark McClusky @markmcc EDITOR, WIRED.COM

http://www.wired.com/2013/03/wired-staff/

uptown• 12 years ago

Bloomberg never learned to code, despite his tweet.

eibrahim• 12 years ago

That explains what happened to healthcare.gov

dmak• 12 years ago

I would like to see his code in github

sebastianavina• 12 years ago

I guess it's something like this:

      drawline(0,0,0,1)
      drawline(0,1,1,1)
      drawline(1,1,1,0)
      drawline(1,0,0,0)

and here we are crazy of his great achievment.

downandout2• 12 years ago

It's somewhat amazing how far, in 2014, people can get without any tech expertise at all. It's not just Obama and other prominent politicians. There are countless incredibly successful business people that are lucky to turn on a computer.

When I was barely out of high school, I briefly consulted for a guy that had built a net worth in excess of $100 million from scratch with a very successful chain of auto body shops. I was first introduced to him after his son told me that a few days prior, his father's computer came up with a message box saying that a program had "performed an illegal operation". He yanked the power cord out of the wall and began contemplating what he would say to the police when they came.

Last year, Steve Wynn, billionaire casino mogul, was accused of threatening the life of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis via email over a $2 million gambling debt. Steve won a defamation lawsuit, with his primary argument being that he couldn't possibly have done it because he had never sent an email in his life.

While technology is an integral part of our world, the most crucial skill for leaders isn't being able to code or necessarily even operate it. It's being able to identify what needs to be done, then building and managing teams that can get things done. If you can do that, you can accomplish almost anything.

Thriptic2• 12 years ago

It's somewhat amazing how far, in 2014, people can get without any tech expertise at all. It's not just Obama and other prominent politicians. There are countless incredibly successful business people that are lucky to turn on a computer.

I know of a CEO of a major American company that has his secretary print out all of his hundreds of daily emails and manually sort them for him. He then dictates his replies into a dictaphone and has her type them out.

daveslash2• 12 years ago

Someone recently told me the exact same story about a company at which they used to be employed. They didn't tell me the name of the company, but they referred to it as a "financial institution".

azernik• 12 years ago

Just to one-up - there was a major security breach in the IDF (as close as Israel has to a Snowden) because a general also wanted to read is reports on paper. So he allowed his assistant to put classified documents on CDs and take them over to an unsecured printing machine, where she proceeded to stash every single one and carried them off the base when her service was over.

clarkm• 12 years ago

I think Donald Knuth does something similar.

LeoPanthera• 12 years ago

It's somewhat amazing how far, in 2014, people can get without any tech expertise at all.

There's a huge difference between "no tech expertise" and "never written a computer program".

kyro• 12 years ago

It's not amazing. Technology has never been a prerequisite to business success and it certainly isn't one today. Does technical literacy help? Absolutely. But it's by no means necessary, and I'd say the majority of industries today don't require any of it. All you really need is an ability to build relationships and have something valuable to offer. If you've got those two down, you can very easily put yourself in a place where you can hire someone else to take care of the tech stuff.

I know doctors, real estate agents, lawyers, consultants, and a few successful CEOs who are very averse to using anything tech, and they're all raking it in just fine.

Istof• 12 years ago

I hope this is not true and that other presidents gave it a go.

rbanffy• 12 years ago

I can almost bet Angela Merkel has written some FORTRAN code before entering politics. Her job is, however, "Chancellor".

nandemo• 12 years ago

The president of Estonia, Toomas Ilves, can code.

Ilves moved to Leonia, a borough of 9,000 people a short trip over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, when he was three years old. He grew up there and learned computer programming at Leonia High School. Ilves graduated as valedictorian in 1972 and went on to receive degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. (...) Ilves credits the programming classes he took at Leonia High School with his work to turn Estonia from a country that essentially had no communications infrastructure after independence to what is now a European Silicon Valley of sorts. The most notable example? Skype was created in Estonia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/09...

IndianAstronaut• 12 years ago

Estonia is moving forward quite a bit on getting people to learn to code. Much better efforts than what we are doing in the US.

meritt• 12 years ago

I bet his inbox is already filled with tech recruiter spam.

cozuya• 12 years ago

He drew a square on a screen? UI developer position now open.

mkopinsky2• 12 years ago

He drew a square on a screen? "I'd like to introduce you to a fast-paced global-initiative multipowered startup looking for a full-stack Rails on Ruby rockstar."

(I actually had a guy yesterday try to recruit me for this company, working on "dot JS node".)

erickhill• 12 years ago

Gore woulda coulda shoulda been the first. But let's not go there... He definitely got the internet thing, too.

karmacondon• 12 years ago

This is actually a big deal. Obama's code wasn't very useful or complicated but that obviously wasn't the point. The point here was that a 53 year old african american man sat down and learned to write a program, any program. It's much more unlikely than it sounds. Do you know what it would take to convince my mother to write a program that draws a square on a screen? We're talking moving heaven and earth here. If I suggest booking tickets on expedia instead of calling her travel agent she's like "What am I, some kind of nerd?"

Obama is leading by example. He and his biggest supporters are people who never in their lives imagined that they would ever write a computer program or anything close to it. There's a cultural barrier that's hard for most of us to see, a clear demarcation between most people's daily lives and the idea of writing even the simplest program. Crossing that barrier is hard, real hard, and I am surprised and encouraged that Obama took the plunge.

Code literacy is important, not so that the average person can become a 10X engineer but so that they can understand what's happening in the world around them on another level. It's the same reason that people should learn physics or chemistry or biology. Because these processes control our world and a basic understanding of them, even if we don't use it professionally, can help give people valuable context. Hopefully this kicks off more interest in learning the basics so that in ten years the sales guy won't think that coding a full featured CRM from scratch will take you a couple of hours over the weekend. We're moving toward a more automated world and the value of understanding it is increasing exponentially.

droopybuns2• 12 years ago

I disagree.

"moveForward(100);"

A publicity stunt should not be confused with a tectonic shift in technology literacy or usability.

Big deal- no. It's quaint, cute and frankly, a little pandering.

cafard• 12 years ago

I don't quite see the pandering, but yes it is a stunt. Should we expect him to join up with PETA because he pardons a turkey once a year?

sdrothrock2• 12 years ago

Code literacy is important, not so that the average person can become a 10X engineer but so that they can understand what's happening in the world around them on another level. It's the same reason that people should learn physics or chemistry or biology

I disagree. None of that requires code and I don't think people need to know code any more than they need to know how a circuit board works or the inner workings of their internal combustion engine or microwave.

What people do need, however, are broadly-applicable critical thinking skills and a basic introduction to logic. Those skills can be applied to physics, chemistry, biology, ticket booking, car problems, oven problems, anything.

blazespin• 12 years ago

This is important for the American economy and for the inner city culture that Obama is always trying to reshape. Coders will rule the future global economy. Therefore code literacy IS important and as a role model to a culture that has been unjustly shackled, what he did is important. As for pandering, no, it was symbolic and the presidency is all about the power of symbolism.

microtonal• 12 years ago

and I don't think people need to know code any more than they need to know how a circuit board works

I work in computational linguistics, and it is often aggravating to see linguists doing hours of manual work on data that could be done using a five-liner.

E.g. my wife is a neurolinguist, and she was manually doing mechanical transformation of some EEG data, which was going to take her two days. I wrote a small Python script on the spot in a couple of minutes that did the same work.

That convinced her to learn some Ruby. Afterwards, she has saved a lot of time by writing small data transformation scripts for her research and that of some colleagues.

The problem is that a lot of people don't even know that it is relatively simple to pick up enough scripting skills to make your life easier. So, I think it definitely makes sense to add some coding to high school curricula, so that people at least know, when applicable, that basic scripting is not hard and where to start.

infruset4• 12 years ago

53 year old african american man

How is his "race" (as you guys call it) relevant?

platinum1• 12 years ago

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf

See pages 16-19

ozh• 12 years ago

Seriously, this. I couldn't read further after tripping up on that bit.

dawidw2• 12 years ago

"race" (as you guys call it)

Do you know better term to describe "it"?

eloff• 12 years ago

The same way his age is relevant. Fewer African Americans code, so he has to overcome not just his age, busy schedule, and probable fear of computers, but societal stereotypes as well. It makes it even more of an accomplishment. The same way it would if he had learned ballet instead (this time for gender, rather than racial stereotypes.)

ASneakyFox• 12 years ago

From the article I don't think he actually did that. It said he wrote one line of javascript. I don't think he even set anything up he just sat down at a computer and copied a line from one of the exercises.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Coding is still too complex for the majority, frankly case sensitive period laden thirty character identifiers and the like still boggle my mind, who thought this was a good idea? The the prevalence of tricks and such, macros and what not, all which confuse many more than they help.

If we want programming to go mainstream we really need to have a near total visual environment. Yeah it won't be efficient but in today's world most won't notice. The people who write the tools may be encumbered with the text laden language but why should programming be solely confined to a text world?

alxndr• 12 years ago

Have you looked at Scratch, from MIT?

adamio• 12 years ago

This is the first step towards outsourcing the presidency

sw00• 12 years ago

Underrated comment.

dnautics• 12 years ago

You don't suppose jimmy carter wrote code? He was a nuclear engineer.

pknerd• 12 years ago

Hmm..hope he will be using his night time to write open source code rather than thinking of war policies that don't work.

richardjordan• 12 years ago

  10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"  
  20 GOTO GUANTANAMO BAY

binarnosp• 12 years ago

"everyone should learn how to code"

Why not "Everyone should learn how to fix a broken pipe" or "Everyone should learn how to cook" or whatever?

Here is mine: "everyone should follow his own passions"

babl-yc• 12 years ago

I'd assume the majority of modern workers are behind a computer all or at least some of the day, and chances are part of their job is repetitive and could be automated. Having the ability to build software for those tasks, or at least recognize what could be automated, would be very beneficial.

I don't see how learning to fix a broken pipe would be as globally applicable.

bruceboughton• 12 years ago

Everyone should ignore my advice.

BerislavLopac• 12 years ago

I have a feeling that moveForward(100) might become a new meme... ;-)

mkopinsky2• 12 years ago

He is a progressive politician, is he not?

JackTheBlack• 12 years ago

When we started to learn robotics, our first assignment was to teach the robot to draw a square.

Its actually a good "hello world" exercise: http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io

Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program

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