In Kenya, Singapore is often cited as the age-mate that got away. It is well documented that during Kenya’s birth i.e. when it got its independence in 1963, it was at the same level economically as Singapore and other Asian countries – the Asian Tigers. Today, the two countries are miles apart. While Kenya is definitely trying, Singapore has since then made significant strides in technological advancement. The most public portrayal of such advancements in recent days came out when its head of government, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong shared the code below on his Facebook page.
Prime Minister Loong attended the Smart Nation Singapore Founders’ Forum, a gathering of IT heads in the country and narrated to the gathering his own personal journey in IT. The Prime Minister, a Mathematics and Computer Science graduate from Cambridge University, told the gathering that the last program he wrote was a Sudoku solver using C++ and that he plans to learn the Haskell programming language when he retires. That was on April 20th, about two weeks ago. Yesterday he shared the screen grab above on his Facebook page complete with a live link to the code on Google Drive (is it time he hopped onto GitHub?) asking his followers (and now you reading this) to note any bugs.
Quick one: how tech-savvy is your current head of government? How many leaders can code? We were treated to an entire news circus when President Obama wrote his first line of code (a single line of JavaScript) a few months ago. Can yours do the same with (Obama-style) or without (like PM Loong) help?
Source: Facebook Via ArsTechnica
