President of Finland writes code with 4-9 year old children | Hacker News Reader

President of Finland writes code with 4-9 year old children

reaktor.com

97 pointsvaltsu30 comments

And here's the President of Singapore's Sudoku Solver in C++. (There is a link from his Facebook post to the actual source in Google docs.)

https://m.facebook.com/leehsienloong/photos/a.34471077892496...

Dang, that's not even a terribly naive attempt. Do you think he really wrote that, or is it a PR thing? I don't know anything about the guy but props to him!

He wrote it. 100% guaranteed.

The surprising thing is that a person as busy as him took time to code for fun.

His ability to code itself is less of a surprise, given that he majored and excelled in math & computer science, and would have become a world-class mathematician if he hadn't entered politics. One of his teachers at Cambridge said:

"No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap. I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician." -- Béla Bollobás

So he's quite the outlier among politicians.

And the Prime Minister himself wrote that he would never be a mathematician: "A mathematician really has little say in what goes on in the world around him, in the way things are going on in the country. ...It does not mean I have to go into politics, but an important member of the civil service or the armed forces is in a position to do a great deal of good or harm."

Previous thread about him and this sudoku solver: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419035

I think he's the prime minister but not the president, the roles being separate in singapore.

I stand corrected. Thanks!

The president was interviewed after the event asking him: "How much can you do with programming?" He answered: "I just learned basics...I can make a circle!". Everybode's gotta start somewhere :).

It's cool and all -- President Obama did a similar PR move a few months ago -- but is it going to help? It's not like the PC was invented yesterday. Desktop computers have been around for 40 years, and at first they HAD to be programmed in order to be useful. Despite widespread mainstream recognition that this was indeed a game changer, the mainstream complained that programming was too hard and waited for Steve Jobs to come up with a suitably simplistic mode of interaction before embracing personal computing.

Let's face it: programming is a niche activity. A vital niche, but still a niche. Is the President next going to fix a leaky pipe in order to emphasize society's need for plumbing infrastructure and the plumbers it takes to maintain it?

The interesting question here is why you have that attitude? And why you are passionate enough to write it down as comment?

What is the point? Children need to learn how to think, not how to code.

You could reverse that and say that you can learn how to think by learning how to code.

It appears to be a PR stunt to promote putting programming on the core curriculum.

I guess they're either trying to attract foreign IT investment or creating a wedge to create space for more privatization in the Finnish schooling system (they're bringing in private sector expertise to teach programming).

It might be a reaction to the slow death of Nokia, too.

It's part of country wide upcoming curriculum change, not a PR stunt, read more from http://koodi2016.fi/ (site in Finnish, use google translate)

No privatization will happen in Finnish school systems.

There's always been professional people giving seminars, talks and teaching, but usually in university/college levels.

I think your cynicism is unwarranted. What I've understood, Reaktor's Code School for Children has been a very much grassroots effort and not a calculated PR stunt.

A code school sponsored by a private company is very much a calculated effort.

Reaktor is very much focused on profit through staff augmentation and project implementations. This code school is to establish branding.

I was referring to the Prime Minister's visit not the school.

Learning to code requires you to learn how to structure and subdivide a problem. Large parts of software engineering training is devoted to teaching people to think about problems in more formal ways.

More people should learn to code earlier exactly because it helps practising reasoning skills.

Most software engineers think about problems in bureaucratic (object-oriented) ways and not in formal ways, because they have been ruined by their "training".

Once they have a job, they discover that convoluted OO code bases offer great job security, so nothing will ever change.

No matter how much you might dislike those ways of coding, they are still vastly more formalized that how most people are used to dealing with problem solving.

For years, people have said that learning Latin teaches you to think better. Why would not the same be true of learning Python or Lisp?

Because to learn Latin you usually (at least in the country where I learnt it) have to read Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus and so on. They are not mandatory if you instead want to learn Python.

That was distinctly not the case when I learned Latin. Though it does explain the origin of that mindset.

How do you feel about wood shop and home ec and teaching art and music.

I'm wondering if they are obsolete, like quill pens and slide rules. Who has a wood shop? What jobs are available with those skills? and so on. Its an old middle-class ideal that every kid should learn those things, plus flower arranging and calculating a bearing on your yacht.

This is the kind of comment I would expect on hacker news.

Who has a woodshop? Carpenters, cabinet makers, furniture makers, CNC operators, instrument makers, boat makers, the list goes on.

The basic ability to decompose and fix real world objects is quite important, and our cushioned zones of computer bliss may make us forget that we need all of those people to keep not posting on hacker news and learning how to use physical tools.

Again, those are things that people with money can do. The vast mass of humanity doesn't have any access to a CNC mill, nor do they make boats in their basement (e.g.because they live in a small apartment). Its a first-world middle-class idea, was my point.

And its completely first world to assume that a boat maker is not a profession, but something a hobbyist would pursue.

I don't understand. Nobody's talking hobbies. Its absurd to imagine the average high school student will be a boatmaker or woodsmith. One in a million get to do things like that. Might as well be learning to make buggy whips or opera glasses.

When was the last time you were inside a hardware store?

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