Best Coding "playgrounds" for Ruby and JavaScript: Best Way to Learn!

[justin]

Many years ago, I used to rely on debuggers a lot. Nowadays, I rely much more on “fenced debug print statements” to quickly get the information I need.

Wrappers on Debug Print Statements

I’m rarely using a debugger as I’ve found that it’s much faster to track down an issue with the right print statements. Basically I can type a lot faster than I can hit the next button and set breakpoints, and wait for the debugger to do its thing. This is how I set up the wrappers for the print statements. Putting a wrapper on your debug print statements accomplishes 2 things: It’s way easier to see your debug messages in the console log. It’s way easier to grep the code to find the debug me…

Reviews such coding playgrounds

• Sitepoint: 7 of the Best Code Playgrounds

Ruby

1. Pry console, with or without Rails
2. RubyMine Scratch File

JavaScript

1. Chrome Developer tools console (Cmd-Option-J)
2. CodePen Babel support and great UI. The hit Cmd-Option-J to see console output.
3. http://jsfiddle.net
4. JS Bin - Collaborative JavaScript Debugging

Any other favorite REPLs for Ruby and JavaScript?

Preconfigured CodePen for Lodash

[treble37]

Codepen is great, I use http://plnkr.co/ for JS stuff too.

[justin]

Thanks @treble37!

http://plnkr.co/