Presidential Programming Languages

Just for fun. What if the next President of the United States of America was an application developer? What programming language would he/she use? No contemplation allowed. For each candidate, the first thing that came to mind (in alphabetical order):

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton would program in Java. Java was the hot language of the Internet boom in the 90's during Bill Clinton's presidency sometime just after Al Gore invented the Internet.  It continues to be one of the go-to development languages for new enterprise application development.

John McCain would program in Cobol. It just keeps going. Cobol is one of the most widely used language in production systems.  Chances are when you go the ATM machine or buy a sandwich at Quiznos there is some Cobol code running somewhere to support that transaction whether it is the system of record for your bank account or the logistics system that helped ship your avocados from California. 

Barack Obama would program in Ruby.  There is a lot of hope for Ruby. It is relatively new and has a loyal and growing following.  It is starting to make its way into larger organizations. From the Ruby website "A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write."  He even knows what a bubble sort is.

Ralph Nader would program in shell script.  I am not sure why.

How does all this relate to this Future of Application Development blog?  Certainly, programming languages will continue to play a role in any future scenario.  But, will the same old languages work as well in the future?  Arguably they don't even work that well now.  We are constantly writing too much code and then a new framework emerges to make our lives simpler.  I think the emergence of frameworks for programming languages actually reveal a weakness in the programming environment.

I know I haven't covered all the candidates above.  Please help me fill-in the blanks.

• What programming languages do you think the candidates will use? 
• And, if you know of some interesting new programming languages or environments that we should research, let me know.

Comments

[Lisa Neal]

You wrote about the next President of the United States of America, but what about the CURRENT one?

George Bush would program in BASIC.

[José Luis]

You are completely wrong (not that i know any of the candidates as i'm from south america), but the fact is that being a politician, the most likely result is some kind if flame war like: "php rocks, java sucks" versus "java rocks, php sucks".

I would be socked if not :-)

[AainaA]

The next President would most likely be ADA, and the VP would likely tinker with Python.

[RBL]

C'mon, man. Let's use our thinking caps and not just hawk populist platforms.

Obama would code in LISP or Prolog, because they're ideal for artificial intelligence.

Clinton would use SQL, the logical choice of any data wonk.

McCain would absolutely, positively use Ada. No question about it.

Nader would use C++0x, since it's theoretically perfect, doesn't yet exist, but will one day if we just keep at it.

[Jason Darrow]

I believe Ralph Nader would be a PERL programmer. As it is one of the most liberal, as far as structure and syntax goes, langauges that I'm familiar with overall.

[Skitsanos]

If you don't have both hands left ones and with enough brains you can do BASIC for anything, so i wouldn't give that much credits for current president...

[Milligan]

Bush wouldn't be able to handle BASIC. He would be doing LOGO, but only the turtle graphics part.

[Nick]

Ha, Bush would even fail at HTML. There would be too many typos in the tags.

[Barbo]

Ron Paul would program in C, it's old, reliable, and makes you say "Son of a bitch" when you realize you've done something wrong.

[Robin]

Bush would even fail at HTML with a WYSIWYG editor.

[Victor]

i'm pretty sure Bush would program in CSS.

"hey, huh, check it out guys, big box... little box... big box... little box... this padding thing is awesome!"

[Tyler]

i can add that Mitt would most likely use C#, taking care of business like no other...but sometime he just can't win since everybody hates big business like Microsoft

[Lisa Maxwell]

Personally, I think that:

Clinton would code in C – it’s convoluted and cumbersome, but for some reason people like it.

Obama would use Javascript – it has limited capabilities and is very user-friendly.

I agree about McCain and Cobol – they will both be around forever and although not well-liked, are very dependable.

[Nigel]

I don't think you can say which language they would use, but I'm pretty sure they'd all say they have the programming experience and that they'd make changes to their project applications. Then they'd release the previous version of their application!

[dan]

George Bush used the word "internets" and when searching referred to "The Google". He would never make it as a content manager let alone a developer.