[ANN] Nightcoders.net, a cloud IDE for ClojureScript

[Zach Oakes]

Cloud IDEs are becoming more common. To quote the rifleman's creed, there are many others like it, but this one is mine:

http://nightcoders.net/

It's basically a hosted version of Nightlight, running the compiler on my server so you can build CLJS projects using nothing but a web browser. I'm aiming at beginners, much like I did with the original Nightcode, but this time I'm going further by eliminating all setup requirements.

Please be gentle with it. I've only been working on this for the past few weeks while vacationing in mexico...mostly as a distraction while my body convulsed over the somewhat unhygienic street food I gave it. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. That may be oversharing. Oh well.

Enjoy!

[Alex Miller]

Didn't load for me...

Uncaught TypeError: gapi.load is not a function

    at nightcoders.js:513

    at nightcoders.js:513

Did I broke it?

[Zach Oakes]

Hmm! Anyone else get that? Can't reproduce even after clearing cache and whatnot.

[Alex Miller]

Ah, it was Ghostery. 

[Zach Oakes]

OK I'll look into dealing with that more gracefully.

BTW for those who were just on, I just restarted the server, sorry bout that. I needed to improve the confirmation dialog for deleting projects/accounts. Eventually i'll figure out how to deploy like the pros do...

[Erik Assum]

It seems like I need to double-click on the buttons (like “Web App” and “Game”) to make them do something.

MacOS 10.12.3/Safari 10.0.3

Seems to be a safari issue, since it behaves as it should in Chrome.

Erik.

[Luc]

Works like a charm from my ipad pro 😁
Luc P.

[Paul Gowder]

That's really cool!  The autosave is sweet.  So is the fact that I can get it to work on ios---I was just thinking about buying an ipad pro and figuring out good ways to code on it... this could be a really cool solution for starting something on a real computer, leaving it in the cloud, working on it on the ipad, etc.  

The oauth doesn't seem to work for me in chrome (on sierra with a ton of ad-blockers and such, so that might be giving grief)---I hit the sign in button, it pops up the standard google account chooser, I choose an account, then the window closes and nothing happens.  But it works in safari just fine (with the same double-click issue reported elsewhere in this thread). 

Oh, one other little thing I noticed... it's not obvious how to close a project and get back to the first screen, like to start on a different project.  I ended up just hitting the back button then reload...

This is amazing!

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 10:20:20 AM UTC-6, Zach Oakes wrote:

[Zach Oakes]

Thanks for the feedback! I fixed the Safari issue and I'm about to take the server down to do another deploy. Hang tight and sorry again to those who are currently on it.

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 10:20:20 AM UTC-6, Zach Oakes wrote:

[Zach Oakes]

OK it is back up now. Please let me know if you notice any problems -- in addition to fixing the Safari issue, I migrated to a server with more memory.

[Ruslan Prokopchuk]

Thank you, Zach, you are making awesome stuff!

среда, 4 января 2017 г., 19:20:20 UTC+3 пользователь Zach Oakes написал:

[Erik Assum]

Hi Zach, 

I just stumbled upon your blog post about this at https://sekao.net/blog/nightcoders.html, by the way of Shaun LeBron retweeting Josh Burkes tweet which cited "We should try to be the next Geocities, not the next Intellij". 

Last night, I spent some time coding with my son over on http://code.org. We started out with some flappy-bird thing, and ended 

up on https://codecombat.com/play?hour_of_code=true which is some kind of strange mix between coding and playing a game.

Since I don't play games, but program, and my son doesn't program but plays games, this thing hit the sweet-spot for us, and I guess

it's an example of an idea I've had for quite some time, make a game where the main interaction with the game is through coding.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this rambling, but here is a couple of points:

1) The flappy bird thing https://studio.code.org/flappy/1 essentially provides you with hooks into an event loop with predefined functions

to call so kids can play around with stuff and see results easily.

2) The drawback with this approach (the graphic coding approach) is highlighted in Tommy Halls euroclojure talk from 2013

https://vimeo.com/100425264, which basically states that these approaches are not turtles all the way down and that that is a bad thing.

3) Knowing that you create games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GzzFeS5cMc), I'd love to see some kind of more fleshed out 

game example in Nightcoders to start, well, playing with.

4) For kids (at least my 9yo), it seems like giving them an IDE and say here, code some stuff, doesn't work. But give a kid something like http://dragonbox.com/products/algebra-5, and they cannot stop solving equations. 

I'm not quite sure why I'm writing this, other than to say Nightcoders seems like a step in the right direction, and that I agree with the

quote from the blog, and here are the thoughts it provoked.

Erik.

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[Zach Oakes]

Hello Erik, very valid points. I agree that young people would benefit from a "higher level" tool that focused on games. I think it should be a separate thing, though. In fact, several years ago, after I made Nightcode, I built a tool just like that, called Nightmod. My latest project, Nightcoders.net, is kind of a web-based equivalent of Nightcode. Based on this pattern, guess what project I'm thinking of working on next =)

Zach

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