hackbrightacademy / explore-python Goto Github PK

How to do this

• Look at content/basics-1.rst and match its headings/general structure
• Remove any mention of repl.it and replace with code playground (see #1)
• print is a function not a keyword:

  .. DON'T do this
  .. code-block:: python
  
    print "hi"
  
  .. Do this instead:
  .. code-block:: python
  
    print("hi")

• type returns a class, not a type object:

  .. DON'T do this
  .. code-block:: python
  
    >>> type(60)
    <type 'int'>
  
  .. Do this instead
  .. code-block:: python
  
    >>> type(60)
    <class 'int'>

• Always use explicit directives

  .. DON'T do this
  Read the following code block::
  
    >>> name = "Hackbright"
  
  .. Do this instead
  Read the following code block:
  
  .. code-block:: python
  
    >>> name = "Hackbright"

• Any question-answer nonsense should be converted to an mcq. Fallback to using togglereveal to hide answers instead of topic:

  .. DON'T do this
  What part is the variable?
  
  .. topic:: ``hackbright``
    :class: hover-reveal
  
    We can think of this like a nickname...
  
  .. Do this instead
  What part is the variable?
  
  .. togglereveal::
  
    ``hackbright`` is the variable. We can think of this like a nickname...

• Use #. for numbered lists

  .. DON'T do this
  1) Make a variable
  2) Then do this
  
  .. Do this instead
  #. Make a variable
  #. Then do this

• Remove External Resources section
• Remove Final Assignment section

To do

1. Explore Python (this is the title page)
   • Welcome/introduction paragraph(s)
2. Python Basics
   • Intro
   • Python Syntax
   • Objects and Classes
   • Functions
   • Practice Section
   • Debugging Section
3. More Python Basics
4. Booleans and Conditional Expressions
5. Lists
6. Logic and Control Flow

Summary

Most of the time, Brython throws regular lookin' errors but since it is a JavaScript implementation of Python, it occasionally throws bizarre looking errors.

The solution is so simple, it's beautiful. And, as a bonus, it makes a bunch of other issues that come with using Brython disappear (because the solution is to run Python, natively, in the browser!!)

Details

NameError looks normal, which is why it took me a while to catch on that using Brython is probably a bad idea.

Later in contents/basics-1.rst, we explain what might happen when you call a function with the wrong number of arguments. This should result in a TypeError (and it does), but not like any TypeError you've seen before...

Yuck! 🤮

Needless to say, this would look real confusing to beginners.

Solution

I can't believe I've never thought to do this before, but since the CPython (the default Python distribution) is implemented in C, it can be ported to Wasm. This should allow us to run Python "natively" in the browser, without having to use JavaScript as an intermediary.

Also since porting C to Wasm is A Thing™️, there's probably a tool that'll compile any C executable to Wasm (turns out it does exist — see emscripten).

Which means that porting CPython to Wasm wouldn't just be an easy task — it could be a super easy task so it's probably likely that someone will have done it already!

Mozilla's Pyodide to the rescue

I did manage to find https://github.com/dgym/cpython-emscripten, a dead Python build for emscripten. But the repo manager doesn't have any pre-built releases and I really didn't want to futz with makefiles in order to get the build to work on my machine. Plus, I wasn't even sure this would work out.

That's when I stumbled on this blog post on a Mozilla product called Pyodide. Pyodide is a data science notebook, which is very neat, but that's not all — it's a data science notebook that doesn't need a Python server because Mozilla ported Python to Wasm and it freakin' works.

Sidenote: it's a good thing I never went down the rabbit hole of trying to build https://github.com/dgym/cpython-emscripten myself because I didn't foresee that it wouldn't be 100% compatible with a browser environment out of the box. Mozilla did a lot of additional work to make Python in the browser possible and I highly recommend that you check out their blog post where they talk about how Pyodide works. Another sidenote — why haven't I ever heard of Pyodide before? Oh, right, because every time I see the word "data science" my eyes glaze over. They really should have lead with "Python in the browser".

Anyways, I've deployed a version of this project without Brython over at https://hackbrightacademy.github.io/test/contents/basics-1.html. I had to do a tiny bit of fiddling to get things working, but I'll document that over in a PR.