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?"<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
A little dissappointed they didn't link to the code. Here's Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Hour of Code work:<p><a href="http://studio.code.org/sh/32532000" rel="nofollow">http://studio.code.org/sh/32532000</a><p>(<a href="http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/39544-wit2014" rel="nofollow">http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/39544-wit2014</a>)
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.<p>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.
> "everyone should learn how to code"<p>Why not "Everyone should learn how to fix a broken pipe" or "Everyone should learn how to cook" or whatever?<p>Here is mine: "everyone should follow his own passions"
Is there an editor on staff at Wired?<p>>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.<p>>Last year, Obama delivered a YouTube speech last year[...]
Only 15 years since the first president to send an email! <a href="http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-first-us-presidential-email-auctioned-60667-222031.html" rel="nofollow">http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-...</a>
When we started to learn robotics, our first assignment was to teach the robot to draw a square.<p>Its actually a good "hello world" exercise:
<a href="http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/RmfP2rHV7io</a>
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.
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.<p>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.