Add Vala Language Support
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Hello Rodion,
My university has been using vala for OOP courses and some of the students wanna practice the language here. Can you please add vala support to the sandbox? It'd be highly appreciated. :)
Thanks, Kaisan
Kaisan, Hi!
Thanks for bringing attention to this language - very interesting, seemingly I never heard of it yet :)
I tried installing it in docker and compiling hello-world, well, it works, so technically it could be done.
But honestly adding language support just for few students doesn't sound like worth the efforts (not the efforts of
first-installing it, but rather about later support every time some versions change etc). Perhaps it's better
to wait at least until Vala gets into tiobe index which lists about top 100
languages by popularity. And anyway it looks by stats like many students in your university prefer to run solutions on
their machines.
We can add vala to the list of languages used to mark solutions (e.g. instead of marking them with other) - to see
if there'll be significant popularity around it...
By the way you can setup some kind of sandbox in the University or on some virtual server and provide students with small tamper-monkey script to be added to the browser, which, on opening any task page, will add the ability to send solution to your custom sandbox server. I think I can help with hints on the process if necessary - though the idea just occurred to me at all :)
My university has been using vala for OOP courses
As a side note I dare to recommend switching to Go perhaps, which seemingly has similar feeling and properties and enjoys
industrial popularity (which should be useful both for students and for University marketing purposes). Also perhaps
it may be worth putting less stress on OOP itself, which nowadays may be considered somewhat an obsolete concept with
languages gradually dropping off various OOP-related features... :)
Wiki says that Vala aims to be close to C# so perhaps your students may simply use this language instead, which may
also be more useful for their further career?
And anyway it looks by stats like many students in your university prefer to run solutions on their machines.
Well that is true since our learning objective is to create a GTK-based (Hence OOP) linux app, with final semester project being shipping GUI app to linux store (A bit of overachiever from my professor I'd say). I wanna provide a way for my colleague to familiarize with the language in this site.
The unpopularity of the language was actually the reason why my Professor choose Vala. It was chosen to be the language of the course to prevent cheating because of scarce resource. :)
Anyway I might just go with your suggestion adding script to run the code in my virtual server. :)
Thanks a lot for explanations, I see now - I understand the professor, yes, there is some issue with cheating... It is a bit sorrow situation, but hopefully it will improve by and by. I think students in your university, in your country have great potential for smart work in IT and it is just a question of time to grow, how to say it, bit more developer's etique or culture... :) I never yet had a chance to work with your countrymates at some international companies, but I guess it may happen soon in the years to come!
Meanwhile vala was added at least in the language list so it is possible to mark solutions respectively.
If you will actually try to build your own sandbox and feel need for some technical insight at some point - don't hesitate to ask, perhaps I'll be able to share some hints from my own clumsy experience :)