

Show HN: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to write, run, and share code online - zds
http://labs.codecademy.com

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mesher
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.

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

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

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amasad
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print_loop)

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mrleinad
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!

~~~
amasad
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.

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jrubinovitz
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.

~~~
zds
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!

~~~
jrubinovitz
Yeah, I will try that next time we work.

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

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amasad
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.

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

~~~
amasad
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.

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anrope
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?

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

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jimminy
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?

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

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

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pitt1980
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

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

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

