Runnable Wants To Become The “YouTube Of Code”

This might be a minor nitpick, but it always bugs me when Ruby on Rails is listed as a language, particularly by people who should know better (developers). There's even a section for frameworks on the site. People searching for code snippets should be able to understand that Ruby is a language and Ruby on Rails is a framework.

I really like the idea, but holy hell the site design needs some work. There are a lot of areas that are overlapping, or rendered kind of funky. The mess of purple icons should just probably go. Also when you finally select a language, the list of projects is really hard to read.

Keep up the good work, it's a good idea, just need to push the design way more.

I love this site! Like someone mentioned on TC, it's a Stack Overflow meets JSFiddle, SqlFiddle, GitHub etc.

Would be interesting to see how they handle COMPLEX snippets / codebase like Web APIs, Delegates, events etc.

I like the idea kinda of wish it was more tongue in cheek.

"Copypasta, the Old Spaghetti Factory of code"

On a slightly more serious note, if they are the youtube of code, how are they going to remove the xenophobia from the comments?

Direct link: http://runnable.com/

Grr, no no no.

Whoever designed this is nuts...that black ajaxy loading screen crap on every page load is incredibly rage inducing.

Works great but the site design needs some work. Am I supposed to see three rows of big purple icons at the top of the home page? I tried multiple browsers, looks a bit awkward and takes up half of my screen.

Founder of Runnable here. We've got some reports that the site isn't loading properly in some browsers. We're working to fix this now, and ask you to retry in an hour :) - Yash

The way the terminal VM works is quite impressive, actually.

I like the idea, but as quite a few people mentioned, the execution is really below par, esp the UI and not loading properly on chrome at all.

Nice, but looking at the paperclip rails example I really didn't understand where to look. The only file visible was the application controller, and the application wouldn't run because the migrations hadn't been executed.

Those guys are terrible IMHO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6272093

When I read "youtube of code" I was expecting video recordings of developers coding sessions :P. But the current form works too.

I'm actually very excited about this as an education tool where you can actually learn by coding.

Great way to get around the work of setting up the environment to get straight into the API.

Congrats on the launch, guys!

Top-left header logo is fuzzy because it is being stretched. - Chrome, PC

TL;DR - Runnable only solves the small-picture problem. The best solution to the bigger-picture problem would make Runnable obsolete, because it's an anti-pattern to begin with.

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The small version of the problem is that it's hard to find these snippets spread out across the internet, and then figure out if they work, and then copy-paste them into your program. Runnable solves the finding problem.

But the bigger version of the problem is that you shouldn't be copy-pasting these snippets into your codebase all the time, no matter how small they are. If they are useful enough that you find yourself looking them up often, or they are useful enough that they merited being posted on someone's blog, then they are useful enough to make into a package and share them properly. The node.js module system with npm gets extremely close to this goal. And for client-side Javascript, component[1] does the same thing.

[1]: https://github.com/component/component

This is one place where other client-side Javascript package managers completely fall over. There are multiple different "types" of packages.

1. There are the typical "big libraries"

  - jQuery
  - superagent
  - mocha
  - d3
  - backbone
  - underscore
  - angular.js
  - etc.

2. Then there are "plugins", which are pretty big in scope themselves. They have to be big enough to be "plugin-worthy", influenced mostly by how annoying it has been to install plugins in the jQuery days, via copy and pasting them into your /libs folder. These are things like:

  - backbone marionette
  - jQuery waypoints
  - underscore string
  - any jquery plugin
  - any angular plugin
  - etc.

Most package managers, with that kind of thinking in mind, stop there, at the "big library" and "plugins" level. Bower has this shortcoming. It's great for quickly grabbing a copy of jQuery and a few jQuery plugins, but it doesn't actively encourage making smaller modules, which is critical to solving the big-picture need Runnable is trying to solve.

3. The third type of package are tiny modules that at first glance you are tempted to just stick right into your /utils folder. These are so small that in old-school package managers it would be more hassle just to make them into packages. (This is why it's crucial for package managers to have as little beaurocracy as possible by the way, to avoid that line of thinking.) These are things like:

  - https://github.com/matthewmueller/uid
  - https://github.com/yields/has-transitions
  - https://github.com/pazguille/shuffle-array
  - https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/to-snake-case
  - https://github.com/jwerle/to-csv
  - https://github.com/segmentio/canonical

Those tiny modules are the kinds of things you find StackOverflow answers for all the time. People keep having the same problems over and over again, and eventually the answers get voted up. Things like, "how do I convert a camel case string into a snake case string?".

As soon as you take those simple tasks and package them up in a way that installing them is as easy as:

  $ component install ianstormtaylor/to-snake-case

Then you start to see crazy gains in productivity and quality of your code. When you do that you aren't copy-pasting some shoddy StackOverflow answer into your codebase, so that the onus is now on you to maintain it. Instead, you're just dependning on an open-source component that is packaged along with tests to make sure it continues to work. It's visible by tons of others, can be improved when bugs crop up, and you don't need to maintain yourself if you don't want to.

Good idea. Site needs definite polishing. Usability is an issue and it just looks mediocre, no attention to detail.