Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
An idea for teaching everyone programming using twitter.
3 points by amichail on July 26, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
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.

Why not adapt this idea to programming? For example, you could allow twitter users to write python programs that fit in 140 characters.

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.

People can learn what these programs do by example and adapt them for their own tweets.




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)


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.


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.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: