It's definitely a neat idea, but as a Python and JavaScript coder, I don't know how much I would actually use it.
For Python, my code tends to rely heavily on modules that aren't found in the Python standard library, which is limited when you're using a REPL that only has vanilla Python.
For JavaScript, code that I show tends to be more oriented to DOM manipulation rather than the console, so maybe that could be something that could be implemented?
That said, this is probably best for teaching novice programmers, which seems to be the goal anyway with Codecademy. :)
Keep up the great work, I really find what you guys are doing to be a huge contribution to education.
Its a REPL[1]. It aims to be host environment agnostic, where you could play around with the language itself (Its accomplished by sandboxing the language in a web worker, and this is also done for Python and Ruby). Try firing up v8 or nodejs shell and do an alert.
There is an added security value in that, were you can be sure that code shared by someone else won't crash your browser.
We'll be releasing courses and tools soon that aims at teaching JavaScript and the DOM where you can go crazy with alerts ;)
You could use console.log, console.time, console.read etc.
For Python, my code tends to rely heavily on modules that aren't found in the Python standard library, which is limited when you're using a REPL that only has vanilla Python.
For JavaScript, code that I show tends to be more oriented to DOM manipulation rather than the console, so maybe that could be something that could be implemented?
That said, this is probably best for teaching novice programmers, which seems to be the goal anyway with Codecademy. :)
Keep up the great work, I really find what you guys are doing to be a huge contribution to education.