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Giving up control - Event-driven programming. The GUI programming style is referred to as event-driven programming. In this style of programming you set up the graphical user interface and initialize things. It appears that the program just stops and sits there doing nothing! There is no input loop; your program isn't trying to read from the user. You, the programmer, have to learn to give up control in two ways. Your program gives control to the GUI system, and you only get control back to when your listeners are called. At an even higher level, your program has given control to the user. It's the user who selects which of your methods to call by their choice of buttons to click on, menu items to select, etc. Listeners. When the user clicks a button (or uses another GUI component), an event is sent to listener method. Your job as a programmer is to write a listener method for each component. It's the user, not the programmer, who has control, indirectly choosing methods in your program to execute by interacting with graphical user interface components.

"Over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together."

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

Schmidt said the country that invented the computer was "throwing away your great computer heritage" by failing to teach programming in schools. "I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools," he said. "Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made."