Thought Provokers From Python’s Guido Van Rossum and Clojure’s Rich Hickey

At Strange Loop 2011 Clojure’s Rich Hickey gave a presentation (video) on programming and simplicity that rankled some feathers and triggered a heated discussion at reddit.

Duncan McGreggor, decided to contact Python’s Guido Van Rossum to interview him about his keynote talk at PyCon US 2012 (video), specifically his thoughts on callbacks.

The Dawn of the Municipal Chief Innovation Officer

Emily Badger in The Atlantic recently wrote about “The Dawn of the Municipal Chief Innovation Officer”. Technically Philly had a conversation with Philadelphia’s Adel Ebeid, Philadelphia’s first Chief Innovation Officer, back in November last year:

“There’s this one side of the coin where people see just this disenchantment and negative view of government,” says Jay Nath, the Chief Innovation Officer for the city of San Francisco. “But there’s also this flip side where people actually believe that working with government, we can make a better solution and better improvements for our society.”

…There are, by our count, just two major cities in the U.S. that currently have someone sitting in this role, and they’ve both settled in within the past six months. Adel Ebeid stepped into the job in Philadelphia after working as the chief information officer for the state of New Jersey. Like Nath, he views his role largely as connecting city hall and all of its resources with a new generation of problem-solvers outside of it.

…The birth of the municipal chief innovation officer job is a response to these two trends: to fundamental changes in technology that are revolutionizing citizen engagement, and to a cultural movement that is turning the data-dense inner workings of city halls into public challenges that are actually kind of a kick to solve.

“There aren’t that many of us right now,” Ebeid says, “but I can tell you we’re certainly an early testbed for what will become mainstream by 2015.”

Related:

City of Philadelphia: Office of Innovation and Technology

Talk: “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”

Allen Wirfs-Brock, a Mozilla Research Fellow, at YOW 2011, defined what he considers the current era of computing, and some exciting elements of where we are and where we are going in his talk “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”.

It looks like YOW 2011 had some fantastic talks to check out.

Al Sweigart: “Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program”

Author of “Invent with Python”, Al Sweigart, makes the case for teaching programming skills while enabling children to accomplish something, like making a game, not as an end in and of itself, in “Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program”. I believe this is mostly true, and the sooner we approach K-12 CS education similarly the better.