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Comment by wlamartin | Hacker News Reader

I can't quite figure out if PHP is the only language that you can collaborate with and I don't want to start a session to let someone down. Maybe you could update the website or any of the blog posts with this info?

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Hey wlamartin. PHP is not the only option, we support dozens of programming languages. When you sign up you pick which languages you already know. The other people will do the same. When you are matched we randomly pick one language from the a list that combines both of your languages. What this guarantees is that at least one person will know the language. If that's the case, one person will have to learn from another, and that's precisely what we want to happen.. collaborative and peer to peer learning!

It's super interesting to see how easy it is to learn the basics of a new programming language when you are coding with someone else that already knows it. It's like having a teacher just for you.

In any case, we have removed PHP from the list... everyone hates it haha.

This is a mistake. The list should be the set of languages both people already know. Letting syntax learning be a barrier to problem solving will not be fun and it will create an initial imbalance in the pairing.

You will eventually want to move to an ELO-ranking like system to make sure the pairs are roughly balanced. Otherwise, there's no way it would be fun for an expert-level C developer to pair with a newbie JavaScript programmer and have to spend the whole time explaining what pointers are, etc.

We are also asking people about their programming level to make sure we don't have anyone who knows nothing about programming. Our purpose with this project is precisely to explore peer-to-peer learning, so we want to force those types of interactions.

The idea is that one peer "teaches" the other the language. It's a learning experience. And what we saw it's that the language it's not an barrier at the moment :)

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