NYC Mayor Bloomberg Vows To Learn To Code In 2012 120
Posted
by
timothy
from the give-himself-a-fighting-chance dept.
from the give-himself-a-fighting-chance dept.
theodp writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to take a coding class in 2012 via Twitter ('My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me.'). So, is this just a PR coup for Codeacademy, or could EE grad (Johns Hopkins, '64) Bloomberg — who parlayed the $10 million severance he received after being fired as head of systems development at Solomon Brothers into his $19.5 billion Bloomberg L.P. fortune — actually not know how to program? Seems unlikely, but if so, perhaps Bloomberg should just apply to be a Bloomberg Summer 2012 Software Development intern — smart money says he'd get the gig!"
He was never a programmer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bloomberg on the Internet in 2001 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cobol (Score:4, Informative)
Funny, but even this is ignoring reality. Accord to TFA summary, he was a EE grad in 1964. While those languages do indeed date back that far, EE students were probably not taught them at the time, and in fact probably weren't taught any programming at all, as that was a different discipline (CS). Even when I went to undergrad EE school in the early 1990s, we were only taught a little QBASIC, FORTRAN, C++, MATLAB (1/2 semester each), and x86 assembly language (full semester). There was some more in the junior/senior classes, but only if you elected to take those, and it was all concentrated on microcontroller and embedded programming. Back in the mid-60s, I imagine programming simply wasn't considered important for EEs, and that any EEs who ended up working on computers (which were room-size and mega-expensive at the time) would learn any necessary programming on the job. The fundamentals of EE simply don't include programming; they include network theory (Ohm's and Kirchoff's Laws), electromagnetics (Maxwell's equations), 3-phase power, etc. It's only been in very recent years (early/mid-90s and later) where they came up with the "computer engineering" degrees, or put the two together ("electrical and computer engineering" or ECE like at one university I went to).
Re:Fortran & COBOL are ok... apk (Score:5, Informative)
Should I use COBOL or ForTran (Formula Translator)?
No, it's "FORTRAN". While it does indeed stand for "formula translator", back in those days they didn't use CamelCase, and making portmanteaus and then writing them in all caps was normal. You can still see it in US military acronyms, such as "USCENTCOM" (US Central Command).
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], they didn't start using camelcase for programming language names until the 1970s, and it only became fashionable for company names in the 80s.
Re:Fortran & COBOL are ok... apk (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's "FORTRAN". While it does indeed stand for "formula translator", back in those days they didn't use CamelCase, and making portmanteaus and then writing them in all caps was normal.
Bzzzt [wikipedia.org]. Nowadays it's "Fortran". The Wikipedia article is an interesting read, for instance "Free-form source input, also with lowercase Fortran keywords" was first introduced in FORTRAN 90.
Re:Head of systems development? (Score:5, Informative)
According to BBC, the reaction of the London mayor was that he's too busy for things like that.
That's completely wrong [bbc.co.uk]. The BBC actually reports [...] the mayor is in awe of his good friend Michael Bloomberg, and if re-elected will explore whether he can join him on that course. I believe you got Boris Johnson (current mayor) confused with Ken Livingstone (former mayor and current candidate for the opposing party). Ken Livingstone stated If I'm elected, I'll be a bit too busy to take any education courses.
Anyway, it's certainly nice if politicians broaden their minds, but it's reasonable that they have to allocate their time and set priorities.
Re:Even today (Score:4, Informative)
Bloomberg terminals now operate over the internet if I'm not mistaken.
They can encapsulate their feed over the Internet, but that limits functionality and requires extra login steps. The standard setup is over their own network. It's has extra security (including protection against Van Eck phreaking of the terminal itself). What you get in the browser is a very, very, very limited subset of functionality of what the terminal itself provides. Although the terminal itself, as an interface, has all the usability level of a cash register.
Re:C/C++ is pretty bad place to start learning (Score:3, Informative)
Re:C/C++ is pretty bad place to start learning (Score:2, Informative)
Like so many other classes required for a CS degree, I use nothing from it in my day-to-day work as a Ruby developer.
As a Ruby developer I just have to point out, without C you can't understand the Ruby source or write native extensions.
A Ruby developer without C is totally weak.