Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sunday, 12th February 2012

Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming?

Absolutely not. The first step in learning to program is understanding that a computer can be quickly made to do something useful by executing lines of code. Personally I’m a big fan of firing up something with an interactive prompt (like Python, or even Firebug or the Google Chrome JS console) and demonstrating that typing a line of code hitting return will get a useful response.

[... 87 words]

How can I see what questions I am following on Quora?

Click on your name in the grey bar at the top of the screen to get to your profile page. Then click on “Topics” in the lighter grey bar next to your photo (the same bar that has the Followers and Following items in it).

[... 62 words]

Python Django load MySQL database from csv files performance issue?

Don’t use the Django ORM for bulk imports—the performance overhead is pretty small for regular web page stuff, but it adds up if you are running millions of inserts.

[... 63 words]

2012 » February

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