Developers have a world of knowledge at their fingertips, but with all the information available on the Web, it isn’t always easy finding the right answer. Microsoft and HackerRank, a platform designed to help engineers advance their skills, want to change that. The companies have teamed up on a new Bing solution designed to make it easy to search for a function and instantly get the solution.
“Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites, like Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange and other blogs,” wrote Marcelo De Barros, group engineering manager at Bing, and Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and cofounder of HackerRank, in a blog post. “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.”
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In addition, the companies will provide a live code editor within the search engine. According to De Barros and Ravisankar, one of the biggest productivity pitfalls programmers face today is having to find a solution and then having to transfer it all back into their editor. Bing’s live code editor is meant to save developers time and help them become more efficient. When developers search for a query, Bing will provide them with the solution and a option to edit the code directly within the 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,” wrote De Barros.
