Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged webdevelopment, python in 2012

Filters: Year: 2012 × webdevelopment × python × Sorted by date


How can some really large services (like Dropbox) afford to use Python as a primary language, if it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower than other, compiled languages?

Because raw language speed often doesn’t matter that much. In the case if Dropbox the client software spends most of its time waiting for bits to load from the network or from disk. Most large websites spend their time waiting for the database. You can’t speed up network or disk performance by using a faster language.

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What are some apps, problems you would suggest to solve a new python developer?

The best way to learn python in my opinion is using the interactive prompt. Install ipython (a massive improvement on the standard python shell) and use it to interactively solve some simple tasks—things like downloading a CSV file from the web using the urllib library, parsing it with the csv module, then poking around in the data using python list comprehensions and saving some of the results out to a JSON file.

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Are there any good Django video tutorials?

ShowMeDo has 55 video screencasts covering all sorts of aspects of Django development: http://showmedo.com/videotutoria...

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