Software:Exercism

From HandWiki
Short description: Platform offering code practice and mentorship
Exercism website
Exercism Logo.png
Exercism Homepage, Aug 2018.png
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s)Katrina Owen, Jeremy Walker[1]
IndustryInternet
Websitewww.exercism.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationYes
Users1,500,000 ((As of June 2023))[2]
Launched2013[3]
Current statusActive

Exercism is an online, open-source, free coding platform that offers code practice and mentorship[4] on 66 different programming languages.[3][5]

History

Software developer Katrina Owen created Exercism while she was teaching programming at Jumpstart Labs.[6] The platform was developed as an internal tool to solve the problem of her own students not receiving feedback on the coding problems they were practicing. Katrina put the site publicly online and found that people were sharing it with their friends, practicing together and giving each other feedback. Within 12 months, the site had organically grown to see over 6,000 users had submitted code or feedback, and hundreds of volunteers contribute to the languages or tooling on the platform.[6]

In July 2018, the site was relaunched with a new design and centred around a formal mentoring mode.[3]

Product

The website differs from other coding platforms by requiring students to download exercises through a command line client, solve the code on their own computers then submit the solution for feedback, at which point they can also view other's solutions to the same problem.[7]

Exercism has tracks for 66 different programming languages.[3] including ABAP, C, C#, C++, CoffeeScript, Elm, Erlang, F#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Kotlin, Objective-C, PHP, Python, Raku, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift[8] and Delphi.[5]

In 2023, the site launched a "12 in 23" challenge for users to learn the basics of 12 different languages - one per month in 2023.[9]

Open source

Exercism software
Repositoryhttps://github.com/exercism/website
Available inRuby on Rails
LicenseGNU Affero General Public License v3.0

The Exercism codebase is open source.

In April 2016, it consisted of 50 repositories including website code, API code, command-line code and, most of all, over 40 stand-alone repositories for different language tracks.[10]

(As of June 2023) Exercism has 3,500 contributors, now maintaining 340 repositories,[11] and 11,500 mentors.[2]

References

  1. "The Exercism Team". https://exercism.io/team. Retrieved April 24, 2019. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 "Exercism's Impact Report". https://exercism.org/about/impact. Retrieved February 21, 2023. 
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Cook, Jodie. "Exercise your coding skills: rejuvenated platform empowers thousands of developers to learn a new language for free". Silicon Canal. https://siliconcanal.co.uk/exercise-your-coding-skills/. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  4. Barek, Saron. "Nitpicks and Devils". Code Newbie. https://www.codenewbie.org/podcast/nitpicks-and-devils. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  5. 5.0 5.1 "Exercism". https://exercism.io/. Retrieved January 9, 2023. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 Finley, Clint. "Out in the open: The site that teaches you to code well enough to get a job". Wired. https://www.wired.com/2014/09/exercism/. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  7. Brasseur, Vicky. "Improve your programming skills with Exercism". OpenSource.com. https://opensource.com/article/17/1/exercism-learning-programming. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  8. Cardoza, Christina (13 January 2017). "SD Times GitHub Project of the Week: Exercism". SD Times. https://sdtimes.com/coding/sd-times-github-project-week-exercism/. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  9. "Exercism". https://exercism.org/challenges/12in23. Retrieved January 9, 2023. 
  10. "Exorcise Your Newbie Demons by Contributing to Exercism". SitePoint. 21 April 2016. https://www.sitepoint.com/exorcise-your-newbie-demons-by-contributing-to-exercism/. Retrieved August 12, 2018. 
  11. "Exercism's Github organization". https://github.com/exercism. Retrieved June 2, 2023.