Show HN: I Launched a “Fun” Web App for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I Launched a “Fun” Web App for Developers

35 pointsallynjalford16 comments

I strongly believe that every developer is a teacher and likewise. Every time you are asked to help someone else understand your code, you’ll always be grateful to be able to share your own knowledge with others.

Explain Code App is the place you can make this happen!

I am eager to hear your thoughts on what I have put together so far. Would love to hear your feedback!

Let me know if there are any other features you would like for this site, I’m open for ideas and would love the community feedback.

Here is the link: https://www.explaincode.app/

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I love it. I love the concept. I have an interest in, and sometimes practice, literate programming, wherein you write a document explaining why and how the program is being written, and sprinkle in code snippets that, with the aid of a "tangling" tool, get put together into the final piece of code. I find that organizing my thoughts this way helps me understand my code better so I'm not staring blankly at a wall-o-text searching for the context of what was written or even a useful starting point. So I think something like this could be useful to even seasoned developers, as a sort of Genius for programmers, showing code alongside a plain-English exegesis of that code to help them understand the thought behind the code. Get humans in there to analyze the code and provide insight, instead of an AI model doing a rote line-by-line translation, and you might have something.

However.

When I open your app and the first thing I see is a God-damned Alegria dude with a full beard and a man bun, some instinct inside me tells me I am not the target audience for your app.

We have plans to replace "The Dude" with something cool that will help with understanding what Explain Code App does.

I can see this being helpful to people who are unfamiliar with a language's syntax/language learners.

For someone who already understands the syntax of a language (or at least the syntax of a related language), there's little to be gained from seeing what the code is doing. Take part of the Python example from the linked page: "The code defines a function called isPerfectSquare. This function takes an input of x, and calculates the square root of x. The function then returns whether or not x * x is equal to x.". This guides me through the code, line-by-line.

A more valuable description is "The function returns true if the input is the square of an integer". In other words, the more useful question is why the code exists. Good comments, explanations of code, function/variable names etc... focus on the overall objective of the code. For example: - What is the abstraction that the code is trying to capture? - What makes the problem that the algorithm is solving difficult/non-obvious? - What are the pre-conditions that a given segment of code assumes? - What post-conditions does the segment of code ensure?

Yes, Exactly what you describe we are working on bring about a release for. The examples on the homepage are the from the first tools we are releasing.

There are more tools to come related to:

- What the code is doing - What the input/output of code is - What this line does

And More, as we develop more and more tools based on user feedback.

I would love to have you as part of the early access group and gain more insightful feedback like this that will ensure these tools are useful to you and the developer community.

Cheers.

Because of Rice's theorem, I don't think there will ever be a tool that can do this even nearly as well as a human before AGI is realized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

The overall goal is to assist as much as possible. It's steps forward for us all.

This could be really helpful for students learning how to read and write code! One suggestion: the code in the live demo is pretty hard to read since it is not monospaced and indented correctly (for example, the Python code won't compile.)

Thank you for that feedback.

Yes, our goal is to assist developers learn, and understand the code they are reading and writing.

We will be replacing that code viewer in the next day or so. Thank you for pointing that out to us, as we are head down in code preparing for release in the next couple of days.

Hope to have you as part of our early access group.

Cheers.

I like the idea But I don't understand why you choose "Show HN: I Launched a “Fun” Web App for Developers" as title Some hint that it's an app that explains code in the title would maybe gain more clicks, attention

OP put the title of your app or something resembling what it is in the title of this post rather than the generic title! Something more informative about what it is, C'mon

Early access form and links are a bit borked on iOS safari in portrait

I will address this, we will be releasing really soon.

Thank You.

What is the relation with tenably.app?

Tenably spawned these tools that we are now making available within a sperate application. Tenably uses GPT-3 internally to re-write code that doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 standards to address web accessibility violations.

We felt these tools could be used by the developer community.

> Tenably uses GPT-3 internally to re-write code that doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 standards to address web accessibility violations.

Now that sounds like a good product. I'd be turning that into a service.

Yes, it is a service we currently offer to Shopify store owners. We will be expanding to offer the service to other headless e-commerce platforms. With plans for an API to cater to no-code website building platforms to help those using such tools.

Thank You for your feedback on this, I'm happy that others see the value in https://www.Tenably.app

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