Scalatron: The best language tutorial / learning environment ever made

Let me expand on how great the Scalatron initial experience has been.

Scalatron has this fantastic introduction in several steps.  Each step produces a bot that does something, and by pressing a couple of buttons in the in-browser UI, you can see it work as well as tweak it yourself.  Here's a screenshot:

On the left is the tutorial, in the middle is the code, and on the right is the sandbox that allows you to actually see your little 'bot running around, limited to what it's allowed to "see".  All this is regular in-browser stuff, no plugins.  And the highest praise I can give it is that it "just works".  Edit the code in the middle, press 'run in sandbox' and it does.  Compile errors?  The build step pops up an error box at the bottom with line numbers.  Smooth.

And then the interaction with the tutorial:  Every block in the tutorial has a "load into editor button" drops the code directly into the editor pane.   Which means no copy/paste errors, and it works in blocks, so if you're working on the missile-launching section and you messed up the movement section with a half-baked idea, the tutorial lets you reset just one part.  This is really polished, catching use cases like, "you asked to load it into the editor, but you haven't saved the work there.  Save first?"

The tutorials were the foundation of the thoughts and opinions on the language that you can read in my previous post.  They take you through the major language features by introducing real problems you need to solve: how do I parse a string?  How do I re-use a function?  What are vars and vals?  None of it feels contrived just to make a point.

And this IDE has room for growth.  There's a little [<<] button on the tutorial that lets you take off those training wheels, and continue on with your bot development.  Save your work, give it a label, and load it into the Scalatron battle instance that loaded up when you started Scalatron.  Instant gratification.

One complaint I have is that it's not very clear from this IDE how to restart the tournament without restarting the Scalatron process, which is running your IDE is running the tournament.  It doesn't always interrupt the IDE, but when it does...

My other complaint, is that there's no way to do TDD with it.  That's a show stopper for me, if I write too much code without a test I start to get physically ill.  So now it's time to get a Scala environment up and running.  This has often been the stopping point for me in other languages/environments as I really have very little patience for cobbling together build scripts or downloading disparate parts.  More on that in the next post.