Introducing CodePlayer: Watch your code like a movie | Hacker News Reader

Introducing CodePlayer: Watch your code like a movie

engineering.hackerearth.com

32 pointsvivekprakash12 comments

I was hoping it would allow me to "play" my git repo.

What I want is the ability to see how a function has changed over time. I want to zoom in on a particular function, and watch it grow from a stub to a hairy beast, as the project matures.

Does something like this exist?

You mean as the function gets expanded into several bald little angels, right? :)

So basically screen capture? I was more expected something along the lines of a visual debugger that steps through code whilst zooming into functions and variables jumping around when they get copied or assigned or something.

Yeah, I was hoping to see my code render on the right as the pieces on the left are assembled from the bottom up (hierarchically, that is, not from the bottom of the code).

Interesting. I did something like this a few years back, sample output:

http://uguu-archive.appspot.com/misaka/replay.html

http://ioccc.org/2013/misaka/spoiler.html (mirror, in case if I ran out of quota)

I would be curious in some implementation details for this project, particularly how the intermediate deltas are stored.

Very interesting. I have used a very similar service to learn html, css, js.

http://thecodeplayer.com/

Khan Academy does something like this with their ACE editor as well. Theirs goes a bit further by allowing you to pause and edit the code (for the tutorials in their CS area) and then when you replay, the code reverts back to what it was before you paused. Would be nice to see something akin to that implemented here as well. At the very least, being able to edit once the "movie" is over would make it far more functional.

This is a nice idea, something like "watch me think".

Yes, the ways in which it can be used are huge. Some of the obvious ones are to teach someone to code and play the sequence later anytime. CodeTable supports collaborative editing which makes it even nice. Other use can be to ask someone to solve a problem and watch them how they approach it. And there could be many more!

The first thing would be to gather more data, which might be difficult, because what percentage of people use online editors for daily work?

Yes. Learning Python at the moment, and after I do a practice problem I often look at the writer's solution to the problem. I would find it much more informative if done in this way, with comments saying why he's doing what when he does it.

Perty cool. Good job ;)

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