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by kytrinyx 4098 days ago
Fair enough. You can also build the binary yourself, since it's all open source. https://github.com/exercism/cli/releases
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Looks like it just downloads/uploads plain data to the web service. I thought that in this age of internet technologies a web site would be enough.
I imagine the idea behind this was to avoid having to roll an in-browser IDE with the advantage of letting users use (and learn) the actual tooling that comes with that language.

I personally liked using my own editor, but the CLI didn't provide much added value in my opinion. The tests were enough for me and it was kind of annoying to have to run the CLI every time you're finished just to get the next exercise...

What about curl, wget, httpie?

Or how about lynx or w3m?

Plenty of people want to utilize CLIs and it's definitely beneficial when learning to program to get as much experience on a command line as possible.

Yes, but what's the value in this website having a dedicated application that I either have to trust blindly or evaluate and compile?

We already have this great sandboxed environment called a browser for running untrusted code from the internet. They could still offer endpoints for curl, if it's just about using the command line.

Thats my question exactly. Why roll your own client when you could use curl?