[HN Gopher] Show HN: I Launched a "Fun" Web App for Developers
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Show HN: I Launched a "Fun" Web App for Developers
I strongly believe that every developer is a teacher and likewise.
Every time you are asked to help someone else understand your code,
you'll always be grateful to be able to share your own knowledge
with others. Explain Code App is the place you can make this
happen! I am eager to hear your thoughts on what I have put
together so far. Would love to hear your feedback! Let me know if
there are any other features you would like for this site, I'm open
for ideas and would love the community feedback. Here is the link:
https://www.explaincode.app/
Author : allynjalford
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-01-04 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
| bitwize wrote:
| I love it. I love the concept. I have an interest in, and
| sometimes practice, literate programming, wherein you write a
| document explaining why and how the program is being written, and
| sprinkle in code snippets that, with the aid of a "tangling"
| tool, get put together into the final piece of code. I find that
| organizing my thoughts this way helps _me_ understand _my_ code
| better so I 'm not staring blankly at a wall-o-text searching for
| the context of what was written or even a useful starting point.
| So I think something like this could be useful to even seasoned
| developers, as a sort of Genius for programmers, showing code
| alongside a plain-English exegesis of that code to help them
| understand the thought behind the code. Get humans in there to
| analyze the code and provide insight, instead of an AI model
| doing a rote line-by-line translation, and you might have
| something.
|
| However.
|
| When I open your app and the first thing I see is a God-damned
| Alegria dude _with_ a full beard _and_ a man bun, some instinct
| inside me tells me I am not the target audience for your app.
| allynjalford wrote:
| We have plans to replace "The Dude" with something cool that
| will help with understanding what Explain Code App does.
| phailhaus wrote:
| This could be really helpful for students learning how to read
| and write code! One suggestion: the code in the live demo is
| pretty hard to read since it is not monospaced and indented
| correctly (for example, the Python code won't compile.)
| allynjalford wrote:
| Thank you for that feedback.
|
| Yes, our goal is to assist developers learn, and understand the
| code they are reading and writing.
|
| We will be replacing that code viewer in the next day or so.
| Thank you for pointing that out to us, as we are head down in
| code preparing for release in the next couple of days.
|
| Hope to have you as part of our early access group.
|
| Cheers.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| What is the relation with tenably.app?
| allynjalford wrote:
| Tenably spawned these tools that we are now making available
| within a sperate application. Tenably uses GPT-3 internally to
| re-write code that doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 standards to address
| web accessibility violations.
|
| We felt these tools could be used by the developer community.
| okennedy wrote:
| I can see this being helpful to people who are unfamiliar with a
| language's syntax/language learners.
|
| For someone who already understands the syntax of a language (or
| at least the syntax of a related language), there's little to be
| gained from seeing _what_ the code is doing. Take part of the
| Python example from the linked page: "The code defines a
| function called isPerfectSquare. This function takes an input of
| x, and calculates the square root of x. The function then returns
| whether or not x * x is equal to x.". This guides me through the
| code, line-by-line.
|
| A more valuable description is "The function returns true if the
| input is the square of an integer". In other words, the more
| useful question is _why_ the code exists. Good comments,
| explanations of code, function /variable names etc... focus on
| the overall objective of the code. For example: - What is the
| abstraction that the code is trying to capture? - What makes the
| problem that the algorithm is solving difficult/non-obvious? -
| What are the pre-conditions that a given segment of code assumes?
| - What post-conditions does the segment of code ensure?
| skulk wrote:
| Because of Rice's theorem, I don't think there will ever be a
| tool that can do this even nearly as well as a human before AGI
| is realized.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem
| allynjalford wrote:
| The overall goal is to assist as much as possible. It's steps
| forward for us all.
| allynjalford wrote:
| Yes, Exactly what you describe we are working on bring about a
| release for. The examples on the homepage are the from the
| first tools we are releasing.
|
| There are more tools to come related to:
|
| - What the code is doing - What the input/output of code is -
| What this line does
|
| And More, as we develop more and more tools based on user
| feedback.
|
| I would love to have you as part of the early access group and
| gain more insightful feedback like this that will ensure these
| tools are useful to you and the developer community.
|
| Cheers.
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