14 DAY TRIAL // Codecademy has been one of the most popular learning sites of late, when it comes to programming of course, and millions of people have taken its courses, to varying degrees of success. The site started out, one year ago, with a selection of web-focused languages, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and the jQuery JavaScript library.
One thing these have in common, apart from being specific to the web, is that they're client side, i.e. they all run in the browser. Now Codecademy is moving server side with the introduction of a Python course.
"We’ve spent the past few months working on adding more languages to Codecademy and the first one (and most requested!) launches today—Python! Python is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide," Codecademy announced.
"Lots of schools and classes use it as a starter language because of its clean and readable syntax. Advanced developers use it at companies like Google and NASA. It goes nicely as a server-side backend to what many users have learned to do with JavaScript," it added.
Codecademy started working on adding support for more languages in January. At the time, the plan was to run server-side code locally, i.e. client side.
This has several advantages, the primary one being latency, with everything happening in the browser, the code ran fast and smoothly and any change could be tested immediately.
Unfortunately, running server-side code in the browser proved problematic and unscalable as browser updates frequently broke functionality.
The site went back to the drawing-board and came up with a server-side infrastructure that manages to be fast enough to be used from a browser.
"Everything we’re launching today has been built from the ground up and rearchitected to run Python server-side. The infrastructure we’ve built can help us launch other server-side languages you’ve been asking for sooner than we expected," Codecademy explained.
You can get started with Python right now with the brand new courses. Of course, if you're a seasoned developer, you can create your own course to help others, as well.