print(10**N, “things!”)

The animated .gif above shows the first program in Computer Science Circles, a project that I’ve been working on whose goal is to give everybody a good introduction in computer programming. We recently achieved our 1000th registered user, and had our 100000th piece of code submitted and run; we have about 100 distinct logged-in users per day. (Also, almost 50% of activity on the site is by users who are not logged in.)

Here is a chart showing how many submissions each user has made:

Is there something scientific going on with the near-linear regime? I have no idea. But the data is legit… there are a couple hundred users with no submissions, mostly from before we tracked submissions, and there is one outlier who submitted more than 3000 pieces of code, but as far as we can see was not trying to break the site.

Coming up next, we will have to change the back-end somewhat to distribute the safe-execution load over several computers, and I think we will likely try to start efforts to make translation possible. (Translating the human language, not the programming language.) It is an amazing experience to have the site used by so many people already and actually the feedback we get from people clicking the “Help, I’m stuck” buttons has helped to improve the writing and features several times.

Go try it out already!