I'm all for optimizing the browsing experience, but the logo has horrible compression artifacts:

http://www.programr.com/sites/all/themes/drigg_theme/img/log...

Hoempage scores 58/100 on Google Page Speed, so there's a lot of stuff that can be done before to compensate for a larger image.

thanks, yes, there's a lot of pending stuff to be fixed, especially UI stuff. We were more into getting the programming components right and hadnt paid too much attention to the UI, but we hope to give the site a totally new look (with cleaner logo!) by end of next week.

Rajesh, cofounder, Programr

Constructive feedback here...it's not going to be pretty.

This looks like it was made by a developer. That's one of the distinctive factors, I have noticed, with the apps that come out of YC, you can't tell they were made by developers. They are given a nice sheen of design and it looks pleasant and inviting.

This doesn't. As a developer, this reminds me of Java and C++ (both of which make me cringe).

Whereas Ruby feels inviting and less intimidating.

Glad to see you guys doing something and I am not knocking that...it's just that developers are people too. We also want to use tools/sites/apps that feel & look good.

Take some time and invest in UI/UX design...it will go a long way.

Thanks marcamillion, your advice is befitting and makes a lot of sense.

We're already halfway done on a totally new glossy look (themed blue & green) and a much more intuitive UX. This should be up in a couple weeks.

We're a small team of devs with no major funding, so we do the best we can given the resources we have. Our idea was to launch early, launch often and keep fine-tuning along the way. Guess we overshot on the programming effort and left the UX work in a little bit of a backlog.

Btw, for better or for worse, Java and C++ are still the most popular programming languages being used in the industry till recently :) (http://langpop.com/)

Rajesh

Is "The Codecademy for Higher-Level Languages" HN editor embellishment? I fail to see how Programr is for higher-level languages than Codecademy & how it's like Codecademy.

Edit: This is TechCrunch editorialization. My confusion still stands.

Hi, this is Rajesh, cofounder at Programr.

You can say that Programr is Scratch for industry-in-demand languages, if that sounds better :)

Is there a link to a place on the website to read about the points system?

I submitted user-feedback about the policy links already.

Here you go: http://www.programr.com/rankings

Working on the policy links, tks

Thank you!

This project is so ambitious, and could do so much good.

You're welcome! It's words of encouragement like these is what keeps us going :)

and youre right, the title is from our TechCrunch coverage: http://tcrn.ch/HeiCBF

Anyone interested in beta testing/giving feedback for CodePupil?

I'll send you a link to one of our games.

We're launching our preview this week after 7 months of development.

I am interested. I am a beginner in several languages (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, C) but I've never written serious software in any of these.

Thank you everyone :-)

Please email me at ryan <at> codepupil<dot>com - subject "Test" to help us test.

thnx again!

I would love to give this a try as well -- a beginner in perl and python here.

I'd definitely be interested!

I Am interested in it too!

I'm interested...

I'm all for "the X for Y", but is codecademy really that prolific that something could be the Codecademy of ____?

As I replied earlier to oconnor0, a better analogy would be Programr is Scratch for industry-required programming languages.

Tks, Rajesh