Other adventurous folks taming snakes are letting us tease those snakes in the open jungle! I’m very impressed with the work of Pythonistas who are jointly working towards an online interpreter.

Try Python by Mike Meyer: The first effort uses a chroot’d FreeBSD jail to cover things up. A textarea and a frameset to house the console and the tutorial. No defining functions or classes yet. One interesting thing about this tutorial is you can retrieve the code for the CGI!

 print open('/try.py', 'r').read()

The textarea technique is very cool because it covers more browsers and allows copy-and-paste. However, I couldn’t get the neat colors and history to work right, so I bagged it. I may switch back, though, if these guys hack it well.

Try Python by Devan L: The second effort uses a textbox to submit code and refresh a textarea pane. This option could even work in lynx and w3m, which would be fantastic. This guy’s brother hacked Python to limit __subclasses__ and the os and posix libs.

Can’t wait to see how things progress. The Io folks will have an easy time with all of this.