What Programs Would the Presidential Candidates Write

In Presidential Programming Languages, Mike Gualtieri hypothesizes about what programming language the next President of the United States of America would use if he or she was an application developer. But what programs they would write?

Charles Simonyi, who Richard Dawkins calls a “combination of International Renaissance Man, Playboy of the Scientific World, Test Pilot of the Intellect, and Space-age Orbiter of the Mind as well as of the Planet,” said, “a computer program sets the processor on an inexorable future course,” which is what presidents do – set the country on a future course. Possibly even one that is related to their campaign platform.

Richard Dawkins (who can’t run for president since he wasn’t born in the U.S.) would clearly program the Game of Life. Barack Obama would write a social user-generated site for political issues. Hillary Clinton would write her own version of HealthVault. George Bush (not that he’s running) would write a single-serving site. And Michael Dukakis (not that he’s running either) would just do a formative evaluation of Amtrak’s web site.

Acknowledgments: thanks to my 16 year old son, I learned all about single-serving sites on such topical issues as Paris Hilton, Twitter, The Empire State Building, and Barack Obama.