>> Do not start programming until you know what you are doing.

For some "developers" that would mean never starting. ;-)

I have had the experience of coding as part of design. It's not always a bad thing. Mostly I've done it to help nail down thought processes, a sort of fleshing out of the design. In those cases, it's almost code-as-design-tool and I don't expect the code to be anywhere close to "final".

Except that Obama has done so much that's criminal, anti-constitutional and anti-American, his endorsement has a negative association.

It's as if Jeffrey Dahmer were to prompte a brand of Bar-B-Que sauce, Aileen Wuornos were to hawk a brand of perfume or Jane Toppan were to recommend people going into medicine as a profession.

Obama is the least appropriate spokesman for this topic, first because he has no credibility among critical thinkers, and second because he knows nothing about the subject. It's having a moron who operates by way of lies and sleaze making recommendations to sentient beings.

Timothy Cook would be orders of magnitude more appropriate as spokesman for technology training.

He might have more credibility if he had the slightest clue what he was talking about.

Oh wait. It's O-Bomb-Ya!

Like water off a duck's back is credibility to O-Bomb-Ya!

It's not as if they have any choice.

Some will see it coming a short time before the excreta hits the rotating device.

Others won't.

But once the shit is flying everywhere, the majority will figure out there's a problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzfo7pmGs...

Back in the 80s/early 90s when I was on Compuserve, I'd be chatting with some fellow Amiga enthusiasts, and periodically one of them would say to himself:

Vaxine: compile complete. Rick, do something!
I once asked him who Vaxine was and what that was all about. He had a Vax computer doing compiles, and wrote a script for it to notify him on the network when it finished a compile so he could resume work.

Dr Van Allen (of the radiation belts) thought my dad was a genius.

At the time, my dad was young, and took a stab at selling calculators (big, noisy mechanical beasts as expensive and big as a desktop computer today, and a lot heavier). One of the places in his territory was the U of Iowa. I gather Van Allen was working or visiting there at the time.
Anyways, so Van Allen was working on a program and was stuck. My dad didn't know jack about programming, but Van Allen walked him through the instructions, and afterwards my dad asked if it ever ran a certain piece of the code. Apparently Van Allen had inserted a "go to" or "return"- type statement prior to that section of code so it never got executed, which was the problem he was having. He went around to his colleagues bragging about how my father had "solved" his problem. Which I guess says a lot about Van Allen's character.

EDIT: doh, left out the point of the story. Obama talking about everyone and anyone becoming coders is what reminded me of the story....

The *idea* is good... except we need young people to enter *all* the sciences, not just comp sci. Where he looked silly was in trying to incite people to become coders.