Show HN: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to write, run, and share code online | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to write, run, and share code online

labs.codecademy.com

83 pointszds22 comments

It's definitely a neat idea, but as a Python and JavaScript coder, I don't know how much I would actually use it.

For Python, my code tends to rely heavily on modules that aren't found in the Python standard library, which is limited when you're using a REPL that only has vanilla Python.

For JavaScript, code that I show tends to be more oriented to DOM manipulation rather than the console, so maybe that could be something that could be implemented?

That said, this is probably best for teaching novice programmers, which seems to be the goal anyway with Codecademy. :)

Keep up the great work, I really find what you guys are doing to be a huge contribution to education.

Thanks for the feedback! It's for newbie programmers for now, but check back soon for some more updates ;)

You can't even do an alert in that javascript console...

IMHO one should use http://jsfiddle.net/ or similar sites to learn javascript.

Its a REPL[1]. It aims to be host environment agnostic, where you could play around with the language itself (Its accomplished by sandboxing the language in a web worker, and this is also done for Python and Ruby). Try firing up v8 or nodejs shell and do an alert.

There is an added security value in that, were you can be sure that code shared by someone else won't crash your browser.

We'll be releasing courses and tools soon that aims at teaching JavaScript and the DOM where you can go crazy with alerts ;)

You could use console.log, console.time, console.read etc.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print...

Really cool, although the line "You're running Ruby version 1.8.7" right after it was deprecated in the latest rails beta is a bit of a downer.. but still really cool!

Its all running in your browser. So we actually compile the interpreters to JS using emscripten. We're working on ruby 1.9.3 and Python 3. And will hopefully be out soon.

I like this a lot. I would love to be able to code in the same online terminal with someone (I'm teaching someone Python right now and she's overseas), but I know collaborative editing is a whole different beast. I may even shoot it over to some professors in case they want to use it. It's better than taking a few minutes to boot up IDLE and can get people coding on the first day without having to teach them about the terminal first.

Glad to hear it. The one thing you can do with your friend overseas is share sessions (check out the share button in the upper right hand corner). Let us know if you have any other suggestions!

Yeah, I will try that next time we work.

Quick question: Did you use the http://repl.it editor? Just wondering because it looks really similar.

repl.it co-creator here. Yes its powered by the repl.it open-source project but more features will be built on top of it and would be integrated with other codecademy products. I just joined codecademy and I'm particularly excited about how much it would help advance repl.it as an open source project.

Okay thanks! That seems quite interesting. I'll be sure to follow the project.

that is very impressive stuff. I wonder if there is a way to load own classes and files, e.g. "require 'my_class'".

Right now you could load modules from the stdlib. At some point we will add the ability to upload custom modules to our servers and require in your code.

Just to be a jerk (not really, but sort of), I did:

  while True:
      print "foreverrrrr"

Of course it looped quite persistently, and then proceeded to ignore my ctrl+c's. Any chance you could catch those to kill a runaway program?

Yes, but may envolve loosing state. Will push a fix sometime this weekend. Thanks!

It would be nice if you had a link to sign in on the page. You have 3 links to register on the page, but not one to sign in if you already have an account.

Edit: Apparently, it's not actually connected to Codecademy that way, as far as I can see. Why not?

Thanks - we're working on integrating everything a bit more tightly!

This is really cool. Can't wait for the Python lessons to come out!

codecademy.com and codeacademy.com two different entities?

thats confusing as hell, I feel like one of those should have realized the other existed and branded their product differently

Great work evolving the product from where it was a few months ago!

For ruby it would be nice if gems can be used as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com