Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

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Call me crazy, but I'm a huge fan of these type of editors (I guess IDLE can be included there too), especially Processing, Racket's Editor (DrRacket iirc) and I'm sure I've missed others (LINQPad also comes to mind!) they allow you to start out with zero knowledge, and in some cases some of these editors have some visual cues for beginners.

What I like most is that because they typically start you off with a simple file and a "run" button, there is no "how do I get this going" you just paste in your "Hello World" code sample, and you're off to see it live in seconds.

I would never use it to build a startup or some production tier work, but for prototyping its great and has significantly less distractions, you're in there to edit code and get out.

I wish Go, Rust, and even D had editors in a similar spirit to the ones I've mentioned. I feel like adoption rate for those languages (specifically D and Rust) would probably rise, especially if you bundle it all-in-one for beginners as some of these editors do (definitely Processing does!). This also would force Rust and D to consider the possibility of having a minimal built-in UI library, which I hate that these new languages do not go that route, it is why Electron is the lingua franca of UI these days.

You can get real far with the Rust Playground https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Same. I started Java with BlueJ and if it is at all like it was in 2009 then I'd fully recommend it. It's a simple editor that doesn't overload you with information and I really like its UML-like project view with arrows between subclasses etc. It's a shame the concept would never scale to a real codebase because I really actually like the idea.

If you could organize it and zoom in/out like Shake in the old days or perhaps Blender today it might work?

You get pretty far with the Go playground but I understand it is limited.

I think Replit is closest to this with a wide variety of languages.

I have a playground() in my .bashrc that simply launches the Go playground in a chrome window with --app.

It's nice for quickly verifying something.

FYI, D has https://run.dlang.io/

I actually use it regularly to run small snippets of code. It's integrated into the documentation, for example https://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm_searching.html#.find, so that you can play with the function to see how it works.

Shoutout to QBASIC.EXE, a single executable file that managed to teach me to program, pre-internet, with no more than its built-in help system.

> I wish Go, Rust, and even D had editors in a similar spirit to the ones I've mentioned.

I haven't seriously used Repl.it, but how close does it come to providing something like this experience for those languages?

One example that comes to mind of where those fall apart is when I was trying out Racket, I was able to copy and paste sample Web code into DrRacket, and have a web server running in seconds, you (for understandably reasonable reasons) cannot do this in tools like repl.it but you can in these local editors.

Additionally, if you had these bundled editors, and offline copy of your docs for that language release, you could essentially have everything someone needs to learn a language in one shot, even if the internet is unavailable momentarily.

You can run web servers and such in replit, it’s come a long way.

Your point is valid, however there is also a strong argument for doing things the hard(er) way, ie using a general text editor, and learning the compile/build process. I guess that this is how most of us here got up and running, and that time wasn't wasted. I'm a big fan of taking the longer route, and benefitting from everything I learn along the way.

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