Overview & Use Cases

00:00 Welcome to this section of the course, where we’ll take a look at online coding environments. We’re going to take a closer look at Repl.it. First, we’ll start off again with a quick overview and then use cases for online coding environments.

00:13 Let’s take a quick look at how a Repl.it environment looks like.

00:17 You’ll probably be presented with something like this. We have a place to write our code here on the left side, and then have a shell—or Python interpreter, terminal—sitting on the right side. And to show you what this can do I’m just going to click on this examples here.

00:33 Let’s do a quick Input, for example. And I can run this, and on the right side, we see the terminal. It’s asking me for my name, so I type in Martin, press Enter, and I get the printout that’s happening here. It’s a very simple program.

00:47 But what you can notice here is that everything that I’m doing is happening on the browser—so, somewhere in the cloud, on their servers. I have a username here, so I have an account.

00:57 You don’t even have to have an account in a couple of those, but the interesting part is I don’t need to install anything on my computer—well, that is, I need to have a browser. But if I have a browser, I can access this online coding environment anywhere. I can write code,

01:13 I can change it, I can do whatever I want. I can even import things, so here I can say import random.

01:22 You can already see also that we have code autocompletion, things like that.

01:29 There you go.

01:34 Right? Ha, something like that. It doesn’t really matter. I just want to show you that you have a lot of the functionality that you have with a local coding environment, but you have it without having to deal with any sorts of virtual environments, Python installations, et cetera, et cetera.

01:49 You don’t even need to save your code anywhere because everything happens on the cloud and that is taken care of for you. A lot of online courses utilize some sort of online coding environments where they take away this effort of installing and getting things running locally, and just get you to code quickly.

02:07 This is one of the main use cases for working with one of those online coding environments. You really don’t have to worry about how to set anything up because everything is set up for you and you can simply go there, access it from anywhere, and then just run your code, get started coding.

02:24 I can take this—this is our URL—so I can go and I can open this up from anywhere else.

02:33 I’m here in an anonymous window and I type in this URL that got generated from the code that I wrote. And you can see, it’s loading.

02:47 And there it is—exactly the code that I just wrote before. I can access it. I could be on a different account now, different computer, different country, of course. And I can just run this code and see the output anyways.

02:59 There you go. So, that’s obviously very, very helpful if you want to share code with someone or if you want to work on something together—you can open this online coding environment, write some code, easily send it to someone, maybe you’re working with a student or with a mentor and you want to share some code with them, and its very interactive and collaborative.

03:20 And as opposed to GitHub, for example, where you can just have the code but you cannot execute it. In this case, everything happens online and in the cloud, so again, there’s no need for any local installs.

03:31 You just give that away to the company who’s running the online coding environment, and you just focus on the coding. Okay, so these are the main use cases, and I’m just showing you quickly how these look like, and we’re going to dive into it in more depth in this specific one called Repl.it in the coming videos. I’ll see you there.