This post was co-authored by Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager at Bing & Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and cofounder of HackerRank
It’s a typical night. You’re in the zone with a half-full Red Bull by your side. You’ve come a long way in learning a brand new programming language when—bam—you run into problem you’re not quite sure about. So, you do what any programmer would do in your situation: You search for the solution.
This is one of the most common productivity pitfalls for programmers today. If you want to improve on or learn a new algorithm, you search in engines and figure out which blue link to click. Then, you have to transfer all of this into your editor. You trial and error until you find the right solution.
If only there was a way to search a function and immediately see the solution in one step.
Starting today, you can.
A New Way to Learn Programming Languages and Play with Code
Microsoft’s Bing and HackerRank are teaming up to provide millions of programmers an easy way to find useful search results. The best part is that the code runs on a live code editor within Bing’s search engine.
Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites like Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange and other blogs. Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only spit out the code solution you need but also edit the code and play with it in real-time. No IDE installation required. This will save you endless time you used to spend going back and forth from search to your code editor.
Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you wanted to concatenate a string in C#, but you have no idea how. All you would have to do is search the query and hit enter. You’ll immediately get the accurate solution, as well as the opportunity to edit the code right in your search results.
“In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too –providing a Rosetta-stone model for programming languages,” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager for the UX Features and Shared Tools at Bing.
What are you waiting for?
Start playing with code on Bing now!