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    The Donald Trump programming language is not for dummies or losers

    The Donald Trump programming language is not for dummies or losers

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    I have a love / hate relationship with computer programming. As the resident developer at The Verge, I've been living the juxtaposition of how a few lines of code can perform a task that would otherwise take dozens of human hours or how one overlooked typo can cripple a project's deadline and destroy my sanity.

    As far as languages go, Python gives me the least headaches. Its elegant syntax and feedback to bugs makes it a good language for beginners to learn as an introduction to programming, which is exactly what TrumpScript — a programming language based on Python but inspired by Donald Trump — is not.

    To code in TrumpScript is to write in malformed sentences consisting of only pre-approved words (all other words are stripped out) and only a small subset of logical operators afforded in other programming languages. "True" or "false" are instead "fact" or "lie," and error messages only criticize your code rather than help track down your bug.

    For example, if you use a word that's been banned, the error message will read:

    "Trump doesn't want to hear it"

    Or if you use a word that's not common English (e.g. not one of the 2,164 approved words):

    "We have a country where to assimilate you have to speak English"

    Some more "features" of TrumpScript:

    • No floating point numbers, only integers. America never does anything halfway.
    • All numbers must be strictly greater than 1 million. The small stuff is inconsequential to us.
    • There are no import statements allowed. All code has to be home-grown and American made.
    • In its raw form, TrumpScript is not compatible with Windows, because Trump isn't the type of guy to believe in PC
    • The language is completely case insensitive.

    If you haven't figured it out yet, TrumpScript is satirical. Created in under 24-hours at a Rice University hackathon by a team of undergraduate computer science students, not all the features are working yet. It's still short of the perfection that Trump would likely seek in something that has his name on it. But like Trump, the language won't admit to its failures.

    TrumpScript didn't win the hackathon's grand prize, but it's managed to at least find a lifeline outside the hackathon weekend. Since the project was posted to Github, dozens of suggestions have been made to make the language more "Trump worthy," including that the language require an SSL certificate from machines that interact with it or implementing the ability to deport modules.

    If you want to try TrumpScript, follow the instructions on the project's Github page to set up. And once you've installed, try this TrumpScript program I've written for you!