40 years ago, after doing a math degree, I went on to study computer
science, on my father’s advice. He said there is a future in that, and he
was right. So for the Smart Nation Programme Office, I have put Minister
Vivian Balakrishnan in charge, reporting to me. Vivian is both a hacker
and a dabbler – He used to be an eye surgeon but since he does not get to
operate on eyes nowadays, he dabbles in building simple robots, assembling
watches, wireless devices and programming apps. His day job is to be the
Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, and so when he builds
apps, he uses the real time APIs generated by the Ministry. That’s called
user-testing. I used to enjoy this; it is a long time since I’ve done
anything. The last programme I wrote was a Sudoku solver in C++ several
years ago, so I’m out of date. My children are in IT, two of them – both
graduated from MIT. One of them browsed a book and said, “Here, read
this”. It said “Haskell – learn you a Haskell for great good”, and one day
that will be my retirement reading.
What's amazing is not just the bit about having written C++ code but the fact
that he used the term hacker propely and knows what Haskell is. Interesting.
As a Singaporean, I'm pretty proud of the direction of my government, and I'm pretty surprised by the Haskell/LYAHFGG & C++ namedrops. How did Minister Balakrishnan even find the time to dabble with hardware and programming? These top civil servants are very, very busy!
Great quote about Singapore citizens trusting the government to do their taxes:
"...we introduced electronic tax-filing back in 1998, since ages ago, before anyone else did it, and today, 97% of tax payers file their taxes online. Because we have kept our tax code simple, you do not need to buy Quicken, Intuit or any of such things. Also, because we have automate the collection of information and populate the table for you, you do not need to work quite so hard – it is a little harder to cheat and so 3 in 5 taxpayers do not even bother about filing taxes. They just take in on trust that our Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore has done their sums right. So e-Government works in Singapore."
That said, the 3 verticals of the whole Smart Nation programme (the elderly, transport & data) seem somewhat orthogonal to much of the SV-style explosive-growth consumer apps. Yet those consumer-app areas are where many SV-style fortunes are made and where young tech entrepreneurs want to go - so there's a disconnect between the two directions.
For example, I don't see massive adoption of a new app/device by the elderly happening very easily - they largely (1) don't know English, (2) aren't used to relying on tech so heavily, and (3) won't be able or willing to pay much for it. It tends to be younger people who try new things - and in fact Singaporeans are relatively less adventurous than Americans or other Asian cultures in adopting new apps/services. Things might be different if Singapore were as big as the US, but it isn't. So I wonder how the Smart Nation thing will play out - maybe the biggest customer will be the Singapore government instead of end-users.
(Tangentially, it's personally been a bit frustrating that the VCs that draw on government money seem to prefer e-commerce/B2C apps instead of industry-specific B2B software. The government puts its money where its mouth is, but still relies on VCs to make the picks...and those guys go for hot, mainline trends. So fundraising has been difficult.)
(work) life is about priorities, and if he really wants to give back in this way, he can apparently delegate enough stuff to achieve it. Probably all politicians can, if they wanted...
I wish more (all!) countries would have similar people put into places of real popwer in governments.
Wonder if you have FoxNews or a similar variant in Singapore? Do they characterize the Prime Minister as a professorial egg-head elitist out of touch with the common man?
If not you have something to look forward to, in the early days of our republic, we generally appreciated educated statesmen. Now we prefer our elected officials to be fun-loving guys next door who see the internet as a system of tubes.
Not really, not in the same way - most of our anti-government "media" is on the fringe. And even if we did, Fox News would glorify our PM, not criticise him - by American standards, he's a hardline Tea Party Republican, except without the same regard for civil liberties.
My rant was about a cultural trend in the US of demonizing politicians for being educated and/or intellectual. FoxNews has worked hard to become a mouth-piece for this viewpoint.
I wasn't commenting on his political views, party, or human rights background, which I know nothing about.
Well, since you've opened the box...[edit: oops, I posted the younger son's profile instead of the elder's] his younger brother is quite prolific on Github (and seems to favour Scala):
It seems that whoever was in charge of updating his blog (which is hosted on GitHub Pages [1]) forgot to remove the hashtags from his Facebook Page post [2].
