To inspire the youth to deal with mathematics and programming, it’s important to have role models, both good and bad. It seems then that the efforts of two students from Rice University, Chris Brown and Sam Shadwell, provide an excellent example of this. Their recently released TrumpScript is a heavily modified version of the Python programming language, created in 20 hours during a hackathon. And as you probably guessed, it’s based on the Internet’s favorite presidential candidate: Donald Trump.
Small tidbits of Trump’s political views and his character can be found, not necessarily discretely, strewn about in TrumpScript. Numbers with a value lower than 1 million are not allowed to be used in the code … because bigger numbers are better, period. This language also prevents users from using import statements. So there’s no foreign code in these programs, because who’d want to promote digital immigration? In addition, the programming language quite ingeniously forces programmers to use only certain words as variables. Included are the most popular English words and Trump’s favorite words, as well as names of current politicians.
The creators go off on a note regarding dismissing failure towards the end of their GitHub page. “ … Most importantly, Trump doesn’t like to talk about his failures. So a lot of the time your code will fail, and it will do so silently. Just think of debugging as a fun little game.”
Incidentally, you won’t even be able to take part in this code if you’re from China or Mexico because, as the creators puts it, the code won’t comply. After all, who knows what crucial technological secrets foreigners might get their hands on?
You might be thinking “I wish I really knew how to program.” An understandable sentiment. But having studied programming for a little less than five months now, I’m already convinced that having a program not tell you when something’s wrong is a critical flaw.
