Doodle Kids

I've read this report a few days ago and, honestly, I didn't know what to think. I went right away to download the little app and I tried to crawl in that kid's mind by digging into his app. Admire my Jackson Pollock artwork that emerged as a result of my fooling around with it, a.k.a. Doodle Kids. I guess, the idea behind is way more important than it's actual programming. It's all based on using randomness to generate simple geometric shapes where, I reckon, about half a dozen parameters are involved. Things like shape, color, size, full or empty 'closed' shapes, position, etc... Then, some extra calls on Apple's UI touch screen libraries and Bob's your uncle. I guess, for an adult developer this is not so much of a rocket science, but a nine year old?! I mean, I was in my late teens when I first came across random numbers for crying out loud... Let alone programming (I think I was about 20 then, programming in Fortran 2 - not 4 - of all things, at the Athens Polytechnic, with bleedin' punch cards in those IBM punchers that could chop-off your thumb if you weren't too careful).

We've come a long way... and the credit for this incident goes certainly to that kid's genes and brain in the first place (let's clone him and save the world), but also to his dad, who, BTW, is a company CTO and loves to develop stuff for the iPhone... but, not to forget, to Apple itself that made iPhone developers' life so easy... from building apps with the iPhone SDK, to marketing them via the App store!

I like the comment on one of these articles about the Singapore whiz that a reader in the US made... mind you, he said, while you lay back and relax that kid is busy programming a robot that is about to take over your job! Jeez, how do you reconcile this with a $800B 'job creation' stimulus plan, brother Barack? Is Wall-e about to come to life from the keyboard of a nine year old in Singapore? Why not?