Jason R Briggs

I was reading Tim Bray's recent blog posts (here and here) about his Topfew utility with interest, and wondered how my go-to systems programming language (Nim) stacks up compared to Go. I knocked up a quick and dirty implementation and then ran against a 900MB access_log from my own site...

Lou O writes:

Hi Jason, Read a few good reviews of your book on Amazon. One of the reviews pointed out “The explanation of String formatting needs to be updated. We don’t do embedded values using %s anymore. I recommend skipping the chapters on Turtle Graphics and tkinter. The introductory...

Jobakhan writes (edited):

Using this code import sys
def moon_weight():     print(’Please enter your current Earth weight’)
    weight = float(sys.stdin.readline())
    print(’Please enter the amount your weight might increase each year’)
    increase = float(sys.stdin.readline())
    print...

Femi A writes:

I just got your book: Python for kids and I’m excited to start reading it. I am 36 years old and I would like to learn computer programming. I figure python would be a good place to start. Is it possible to become an expert at python in 6 months with intensive efforts? And if ...

Robin L writes (excerpted):

I am trying to teach myself how to code and thought this was a good place to begin. I am having trouble with the “multiplying strings” section. I don’t know anyone else who codes so I am hoping that you are still available at this email. This is the *part about pri...

Lee writes:

I’m not fully understanding the HugeHairyPants program on pages 72-73 of Python For Kids. I initially thought that the loop would produce “huge huge hairy hairy pants pants,” reasoning that the program would assign the first value to i, then the identical value to j, and continue...