Show HN: PyCloud, a Python IDE in the web browser with interactive tutorials | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PyCloud, a Python IDE in the web browser with interactive tutorials

jitouch.com

130 pointssiong198728 comments

My friend worked on this for the Facebook Hackathon over the weekend. We were late for the submission for the competition because a 24 hour hackathon ended up with just 22 hours only. Guess we are just going to show it here.

This is a Python IDE with a built in Python compiler. We utilized HTML5 local storage to make it work even without internet connection. You just have to load it once, after that, it should work.

We also took the idea from codeacademy and added some Python lessons for people who are interested in Python.

Tip: Try to use your iPad/iPhone and add this to your homescreen. Now, you will have a workable Python compiler in your iPad/iPhone. It works without internet connection. Since Apple doesn't allow Python compiler similar app to be submitted to the App Store, guess this is a cool hack to have a Python compiler in your iPad/iPhone.

github link: https://github.com/siong1987/pycloud

Not sure why, but on my ipad2, it crashes the entire browser every time I open it. Did anyone test it on ipad2?

My friend did test it on his iPad2. It worked. I currently have no iPad2 with me. Will let you know again once I get my hands on an iPad2.

Same crash here on Chrome 13.0.782.220 m on Windows.

Same crashing result here on iPad 1.

While it loaded in Safari (and before it crashed) i clicked the bookmark icon and added bookmark to home screen. Then when i accessed it from the home screen it worked (after loading up). This was on ipad 1

Yep, crashed on my iPad2 as well.

Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 2, in ImportError: No module named numpy

I think this has lots of potential, great work.

You might wanna stop or warn when the script takes a while to run, I tried running lesson 2 with range(30) and it crashed the page (Mac/Chrome).

Putting a save button on the header might avoid some confusion too.

THere is an app called .PyPad that features a working implementation of Python, although it lacks any IDE features except interactive mode.

Cool, what is the library support like at this time?

similar name to http://www.picloud.com/

Endow this technology with the amount of content that a book would have, like Zed Shaw's Learn Python The Hard Way, and you have a killer product. Though Zed would disagree that typing the code out yourself from scratch is the best way to learn.

Pretty cool but I was surprised at the second lesson:

> Now, we will show you a little more complicated code. You probably already know what this code does. Let's click Run to see the output.

Um, what kind of tutorial assumes the student already knows the material?!!!

To give you some context, this app is originally built to be presented to all the hackers at Facebook Hackathon. Sorry about the misleading line up there.

This is a cool project. :-)

It also doesn't work in Opera, because the emscripten compiled CPython doesn't work with this browser. No problems in latest stable Firefox.

Make the tutorials really newcomer friendly and you have 100,000 potential users at Stanford online AI class.

If I try "import math" or "import itertools" I get an ImportError. "import sys" works though.

Hi, nice app. Just to be a pedant, there is a syntax error in lesson 5.

if 2 + 3 = 5: print "OK!"

Should be:

if 2 + 3 == 5: print "OK!"

That was the lesson, to see that the IDE does not compile errors and has syntax highlighting for it.

Very cool, but it eats memory like crazy. (Chrome 14, Linux.)

Very nice! Just one request: use a font other than courier.

Why? Courier is widely available and code is readable and monospaced.

I find courier very ugly and borderline unreadable.

add keyboard shortcut options, eg vim and emacs, and people might use it for real :-)

Seriously? You want him to implement Vim or Emacs in the browser?

If adding keyboard shortcuts of those two is implementing them, then we've got emacs implemented in Eclipse. And every major IDE. Yay!

Oh, wow, look - it's just as if I'm on a Mac! Great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com