CodeAbbey - website for really newbie programmers

[RodionGork]

Hi, Friends!

Few months ago I've started developing a web-site with a goal to provide some help to newcomers in programming.

http://codeabbey.com

In its core it is a collection of programming problems - to solve them users should write some code, process random input data and submit correct result (so it is result which is checked).

After a while I decided it would be useful to allow people to see each other's solutions - of course only after the given problem is solved by this particular user - so one can learn something comparing other's code with one's own.

Later I came to idea it may be useful to allow comments under solutions, so people can write some messages pointing out potential problems or disadvantages etc.

This functionality was added only few days ago.

As you see, I'm a bit slowpoke in inventing features to my site. So I would be glad to be hinted with more ideas about things to be probably added to it.

For example right now I have no clear idea how to popularize comments system just implemented. Probably commenting should give some "compassion points" to user and some tasks should require spending some of these special points for solving. Not quite sure it would be good.

Thanks in advance for all your hints, advice and ideas.

[cookiem0nster]

Hi! congrats on your new site. I think it's a lovely effort, and very worthwhile. One piece of input, at least from my end, is to provide your users not only with the answers, but also with some elaborations on things they should / shouldn't do when writing code. This will be of course more evident when they tackle problems when they have to work with string or collections and things like that. Instilling some good principles, even just slightly, at the very beginning is something which will dividends for people learning to program just a bit down the road. Just my two cents, and once again - great job and best of luck!

[RodionGork]

> some elaborations on things they should / shouldn't do when writing code

Hm-m-m... Not sure whether I get you right, but your hint give me the following idea:

after submitting an answer, if it is correct, the user should be able to view some editorial remarks at the results page - discussing good and bad approaches to the problem.

For example some people here used each-by-each comparison (with O(N^2) performance) to filter out non-unique words in a string instead of hashmap...

Thanks, this looks like important feature I should add!