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List of Street Names, List of Last Names
I wrote some programs to go through 6 GB of OpenStreetMap data from http://metro.teczno.com so that I could extract a list of street names for an upcoming game project. The game will use procedural...
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The Things I Hate About IDLE That I Wish Someone Would Fix
I’ve written a book on Python programming for kids and complete beginners. I’ve also done some classroom and one-on-one teaching with adults and teens. I have them use IDLE, the IDE that comes with...
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Pyganim – A Pygame module to make sprite animation dead simple.
Download pyganim.py and example programs. (Works on both Python 2 and 3.) Details at http://inventwithpython.com/pyganim/ Pyganim is a module that you can import into your Pygame games to handle...
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“I Need Practice Programming”: 49 Ideas for Game Clones to Code
So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you’ve read the free book, “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python”, a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at...
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Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables,...
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“How much math do I need to know to program?” Not That Much, Actually.
Here are some posts I’ve seen on the r/learnprogramming subreddit forum: How much math do you need to become a good programmer? Should I brush up on math? This may be the dumbest question I have ever...
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CircleMUD Data in XML Format for Your Text Adventure Game
Long before World of Warcraft, people played text-based MMORPGs called MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon). These were basically multiplayer text adventure games where people could wander through a virtual world...
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A Modest Proposal: Please Don’t Learn to Code Because It Will Damage Your...
Jeff Atwood wrote a post on his Coding Horror blog entitled “Please Don’t Learn to Code” in which he rails against the idea that “everyone should learn programming”. And I couldn’t agree more. People,...
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A Common Programmer Mistake: Dog is not the Opposite of Cat
True is the opposite of false. Up is the opposite of down. What is the opposite of dog? If you replied “cat”, what exactly makes cats the opposite of dogs the same way up is the opposite of down? I use...
View ArticleWhy Is HTML Not A Programming Language?
HTML is not a programming language. While some may point out that HTML is a “markup language”, this doesn’t clarify how that is different from a programming language. I’d like to provide a simple...
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