

An idea for teaching everyone programming using twitter. - amichail

Microblogging has made blogging quick and easy.  No longer do you need to write up an elaborate blog post.  Just a sentence or two would do.  Tweets are also quick and easy to read.<p>Why not adapt this idea to programming?  For example, you could allow twitter users to write python programs that fit in 140 characters.<p>Such programs would execute in your twitter reader by default, sandboxed and with a time limit. This would be particularly compelling if you have access to a graphics library and can create cool patterns in your tweets.<p>People can learn what these programs do by example and adapt them for their own tweets.
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mahmud
It's call a REPL and any decent programming language has one. Instead of
creating a project; a new directory, a build script, manifest file, etc. all
you have to do is type an expression at the repl and have it evaluated
immediately.

You couldn't "tweet" code because tweeting has a longer response latency than
a REPL; you're waiting for a human twiteratus douchebag to write back or
acknowledge your existence. But the repl makes up her mind in an instant, so
you're hooked in a far more enjoyable, not to mention far more enlightening
dialog than you could ever have on twitter.

Try it:

telnet prompt.franz.com 23

(look, an odd-ball question deserves and odd-ball answer, alright)

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saurabh
Fascinating indeed. On top of that, it would really help leverage the 140
character limit if some sort of re-usability was introduced. I was wondering
about the same thing and i even coined the term "social programming" for that
a few days back while brainstorming with my friend.

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silvio
That is a really sweet idea. I envision a sort of LOGO style language with the
output being visual. There's a Javascript based LOGO interpreter at
<http://www.calormen.com/Logo/> which could come handy. It would be quite
amusing to see people tweeting LOGO sentences.

