I think exercism is wonderful project and community. Its goal is to provide the opportunity to practice languages by following exercises and you have the option to receive code reviews from experts that can teach idiomatic coding style. I have been a regular donor since I discovered it last year. It has a non profit model where some users donate time, some money, some both. It should be more known
Good note for future language developers: If you’re on the fence about implementation language for compilers, not that picking a language like C, C++, Rust or Zig will allow you to distribute your compiler as a WASM module that you can run in the browser.
This way you can host an interactive language playground at $0 cost.
Plus TIC-80 can run games written in lua, ruby, js, moonscript, fennel, scheme, squirrel, wren, janet or python in the browser: https://tic80.com/learn
Running all this stuff server-side probably made sense when Exercism was started, but if you were building something like that today it would not be my first choice.
A pity. Exercism can be a great way to demonstrate the idiom of a new language. I find the Unison project, for example, to be very interesting. Its creators have been very active in the Unison track in Exercism, which has helped me and others learn it.
Exercism is a great site and I’ll be sad if it goes away entirely. It’s a really wonderful service and community.
I used it throughout 2023 to tour new languages and have been on a deep dive of Rust this year in their 48in24 program. The UI and tooling is great, there are real humans available to mentor and everything is open source and volunteer driven. They make learning fun and that’s no small feat.
Of course, things like this cost money to run, especially when there’s so much going on behind the scenes. Sad that the current iteration hasn’t worked out financially, but I have every faith in the team that there are good things ahead.
I think exercism is wonderful project and community. Its goal is to provide the opportunity to practice languages by following exercises and you have the option to receive code reviews from experts that can teach idiomatic coding style. I have been a regular donor since I discovered it last year. It has a non profit model where some users donate time, some money, some both. It should be more known
$7,500 just for servers? Wow…
They also run all the code the users write, maybe that explains need for a lot of servers.
Good note for future language developers: If you’re on the fence about implementation language for compilers, not that picking a language like C, C++, Rust or Zig will allow you to distribute your compiler as a WASM module that you can run in the browser.
This way you can host an interactive language playground at $0 cost.
You can also have an interpreter. Python officially supports this, for example:
https://devguide.python.org/getting-started/setup-building/#wasi
https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-2
Not to mention:
Plus TIC-80 can run games written in lua, ruby, js, moonscript, fennel, scheme, squirrel, wren, janet or python in the browser: https://tic80.com/learn
Running all this stuff server-side probably made sense when Exercism was started, but if you were building something like that today it would not be my first choice.
Jeremy went into some details about their costs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41464985
When I read “$7.5k for servers” I immediately though of AWS/ECS. Unfortunately, I was right…
A pity. Exercism can be a great way to demonstrate the idiom of a new language. I find the Unison project, for example, to be very interesting. Its creators have been very active in the Unison track in Exercism, which has helped me and others learn it.
I found Exercism through the Unison project. A nice way to learn indeed!
Exercism is a great site and I’ll be sad if it goes away entirely. It’s a really wonderful service and community.
I used it throughout 2023 to tour new languages and have been on a deep dive of Rust this year in their 48in24 program. The UI and tooling is great, there are real humans available to mentor and everything is open source and volunteer driven. They make learning fun and that’s no small feat.
Of course, things like this cost money to run, especially when there’s so much going on behind the scenes. Sad that the current iteration hasn’t worked out financially, but I have every faith in the team that there are good things ahead.
Oh hey, neat website. I’ve been trying to learn OCaml and they do indeed have an OCaml track. Won’t mind kicking them a few bucks.