Editing code in the browser may make limited sense if the code is going to run in that same browser. However, why I would want to edit “on the web”, losing all my local utilities and more, escapes me.
This “do EVERYTHING in your browser” fad has gone far enough. We have the most powerful desktop gear ever but every blinking of the cursor has to be done by a remote service?
Sadly, it's not anywhere on the page text but the <title> makes it clear: “for learners and educators”
This makes a TON of sense for those groups where someone doesn't spend half of their class time walking people through installing and configuring apps, dealing with whatever weird system customizations they've made, etc. Every time I've helped at a tutorial, that's been a big problem with some people never getting fully up and running in time.
Instead, it's “click this link” and you're actually in the class, with the ability to have pre-canned examples and starting points ready to go without also having to cover things like version control first.
The more I realize how much students struggle with setting up tooling for development, the more I start to wonder if we need to start focusing more on that instead of trying to skip it.
When I first starting programming a lot of my difficulty and frustration was trying to get my free copy of Borland Turbo C++ running. Once I got a bit older and started to learn Linux and more fundamental things about operating systems, programming became a much easier because the additional tooling steps were much easier.
EDIT: It's certainly possible tooling will soon become a thing of the past, but judging by the trends and past experience, I do start to wonder if it's time to expect it as a necessary evil and start to handle if head on as opposed to trying to avoid it.
Yes, I'm a cs professor and we just introduced an online, 1 credit "Software development tools" course for this reason. Students had so much trouble with this that it was really interfering with their course work.
Back in the old days, we'd have labs of computers with the software for the course pre-installed. Now that everyone has their own computer, I guess that doesn't make sense anymore, but software installation is still a problem.
At my university, some courses have started making virtual machines for students with all of the necessary software. This also turns out to be a problem because installing virtualbox or VMWare on a variety of laptops can be difficult for the course staff.
I totally agree. Even if we successfully build a future where we can have developers/designers jump right into their work without having to understand much about configuration/setup/etc we're still going to need people who do get it. This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.
> This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.
Maybe we should be working to improve the dev environments in the "real world" so that programmers can focus on programming?
What I'd really like to see is a strong focus on making the the default experience decent so many people can avoid needing to tinker but having some obvious directions to look in when you realize that you've outgrown the defaults.
A small example I'd use is the way the Python infrastructure around the package installer (pip) has improved over the last couple of years. Experienced developers used to have a ~/.pip.conf to set defaults like caching, timeouts, failover, etc. but it was a perennial hassle for newcomers. Since then, a lot of time has gone into removing the needs for that config (e.g. adding a CDN, making caching better and enabling it by default, etc.) which saves time for newcomers and means that experienced developers can stop maintaining another dotfile.
I just linked this to my girlfriend who's going to her first HTML intro class tonight. Seeing the immediate results of your experiments is not only satisfying but highly productive. Installing code editors and "cryptic acronyms" is a deterrent to learning programming.
If you are struggling with getting your environment setup you need to take so and so class. There should be a class for just getting an environment setup and doing basic sys admin tasks.
If it wasn't for Thimble I would never have done anything locally. I wouldn't have been able to install Git.
I am an educator and a volunteer contributor to Mozilla Learning. I can honestly say that everything I have learned about HTML/CSS is due to using Thimble in my teaching for the last year and a half.
For my students, who are not in digital arts, computer science, or web design programs Thimble is a wonderful scaffold. This new version is even better.
If they get to the level where they are editing locally my students will now be able to download projects.
Agreed. Some of these tasks are things where it's reasonable to expect people to learn concepts or specific tools but in many cases it's still overhead even if people have learned coping strategies.
As someone who has taught JavaScript workshops in which 10% of the class wasted half the class trying to install Node & NPM just to set up a development server that could reliably serve static assets (the last thing I expected to be a problem), I can attest to the value of this.
Granted, plnkr.co probably would have worked just as well, but giving everybody a consistent (and persistent, and reasonably performant) dev environment in an educational setting makes a huge difference.
>> Sadly, it's not anywhere on the page text but the <title> makes it clear: “for learners and educators”
It is right on the front page: "Thimble is an online code editor that makes it easy to create and publish your own web pages while learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript."
The text of the <title> element is not present anywhere on the page, even though there's plenty of room in the logo at the top element to expand it.
The “while learning” bit is a nice nod in that direction but it's in de-emphasized text at the end of a block (the only other text that small is the login link in the upper corner). Given the number of people who didn't get why the project exists at first, I would suggest that it should be more prominent.
This could be as simple as changing the highlighted text “Write the Web On the Web” title to “Learn to Write the Web On the Web” so it doesn't give the impression that this is intended to be a general-purpose editor.
That's great, but as someone who writes a whole bunch of PoC code and demonstrator articles, this is literally the thing I've been waiting all these years for. I don't need "tooling" beyond a good editor with dynamic extensions, which this is: it's just Adobe's "Brackets" code editor, made to run in the browser, with an automatic live server so I can immediately see what's happening instead of having a text editor, terminal, and browser open. I'm a professional web dev, and the _fewer_ tools I need to do what I love, the more I'm going to stick with whoever can offer me that.
It won't let me write node.js style code right now, but then they just completely rewrote this from a pretty simple jsbin-alike (single file, live preview, friendly error reporting, that was it) to a full blown Brackets with an in browser POSIX file system that automatically syncs on file changes. It's both insane and beautiful, and I'm already finding myself firing it up instead of jsbin or jsfiddle or codepen, and having far more fun because I have a full editor under my finger tips.
Reading through http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble, which explains the whole thing in a level of detail that doesn't belong on the front page, is fascinating, and might make you acknowledge that there's definitely a place for this kind of thing on the web, and that there are plenty of people who would have loved to have something like this from day one.
I mean, come on: if this is their MVP launch, imagine what this thing can do in a few months or even a year.
Could not agree more. However you do realize that this is a favorite idea of the founders of YC? PG and RM's company was based around it. Recently someone posted a video of an interview with PG and he seemed absolutely enamoured with a more recent "cloud" company that did the same thing. He thought it was cool that the code entered on the screen never for a moment was saved on the author's own computer.
I use my browser to browse. And that's all. This allows the browser to be smaller, faster, less complex, and, if it matters, more secure.
In addition to what others have said. I'll add that some environments (Tablet, Phone, Watch, Set Top Box) are more restrictive than others (try porting a cpp app to Android sometime). Also, some systems might be missing some required libraries or have incompatible versions of those libraries (try porting a cpp app to Android some time).
Contrast that to just loading up a page on a browser.
Although I can understand your point of view, you must understand that creating a web based editor or IDE ( like Thimble ) has a ton of advantages. One being it helps people learn to code.
It helps them in this because they don't have to install and editor, they don't have to configure it and best of all the don't have to install and configure their development environment. All a user has to do is sign in, pick a language and start coding, it literally takes less then a minute.
Also the fact that they can collaborate in real time and get help from a friend, is not a small feature to have for them.
Although this may not sound appealing to you...their are many people where these features will make or break their initiative to start coding.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of the Cloud IDE - Codeanywhere.com
You really can do almost everything in the browser there - the (remarkably solid) editor plugs into an actual terminal on a VM, with full build tools, deployment integrations, etc.
This “do EVERYTHING in your browser” fad has gone far enough. We have the most powerful desktop gear ever but every blinking of the cursor has to be done by a remote service?