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Author's profile photo Lars Hvam

ABAP on Exercism

Exercism is an online, open-source, free coding platform that offers code practice and mentorship on 50+ different programming languages.

And now ABAP is available too! Just login and start writing ABAP code, this is probably the easiest way ever to get started with ABAP!

 

Join us online on Friday morning(central EU) for chat and questions regarding ABAP on Exercism,

As always, this is open source, and there is a lot of tech behind it so expect bugs 🤠 Everyone is welcome to help adding additional exercises, just open a pull request on GitHub 😀

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      Author's profile photo Mike Pokraka
      Mike Pokraka

      You forgot to mention that Friday's livestream Launch Event coincides with SAP turning 50 years old on the exact same day.

      And before anyone asks: No we didn't plan that, sheer coincidence!

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      SAP completed 25 years in India as well 🙂

       

      Author's profile photo Mike Pokraka
      Mike Pokraka

      Note that Thomas Jung's little intro video won't play on this site just by clicking it in the blog, please use this link to play it on YouTube if you're having trouble:

      Introducing ABAP on Exercism - practice and improve your ABAP skills online

      (The same link will also show the livestream)

      Author's profile photo DJ Adams
      DJ Adams

      This is so great to see - while I can't wait to chat with you and the others on the team behind the scenes in tomorrow's live stream, I wanted to publicly congratulate you on a superb feat of engineering here too. 💪

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler

      This is great and your online session this morning (last night for some!) was really helpful to set the stage for ABAP on Exersism. I've been playing a bit with it today but am wondering how to know which ABAP-statements work and which will cause errors. Is there a list somewhere of statements which should work? It for example looks as if "DESCRIBE" or inline declarations with DATA(...) don't work (or I'm really doing something wrong!).

      I find the error messages a bit cryptic (possibly due to not being familiar with ABAPLint), so I'm perpetually wondering if I'm doing something wrong or if something is not quite working as expected. It's also a challenge to work with an editor which doesn't highlight syntax errors right away nor comes with "F1-Help" for the many ABAP statements to get the syntax right. How are complete "newbies" to the language dealing with that?

      I'm currently working on "Scrabble Score" but am hitting an error I don't understand:

      We received the following error when we ran your code:
      FIND, runtime, no input, s empty

      Thanks much for any pointer you have!

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Lars Hvam
      Lars Hvam
      Blog Post Author

      suggest opening an issue at https://github.com/exercism/abap/issues with the code, then we'll get it working 🙂

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler

      Blogged about my first experiences with and take-aways from Exercism, which is just "My sort of fun"!

      Author's profile photo Jens Zähringer
      Jens Zähringer

      Hi Lars,

      to be honest, I did not know Exercism before. But now I had a closer look on it because of your ABAP-implementation on this platform. I tried the first excercises and I really like it.

      Thank you for your work on this topic 🙂

      KR
      Jens

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      It would be amazing if such fun ABAP live shows are conducted every Friday it's a treat for the weekend .... Please do it 

      All the master wizards of the ABAP after so long ....

      I have  a few questions if I am allowed I don't know if creating a separate question will help or not but still I am asking here because the master craftsman are all here some one might see it and answer it.

       

      The current ABAP CDS is getting messy and very very confusing at best-

      1. Is SAP planning to bring parity between AMDP and CDS table functions?
      2. Is SAP planning to streamline CDS like say CDS with custom entities can be used in association like CDS table functions can that happen?
      3. The current CDS UI projection layer is very messy and far cry from proper decent coding any plans to bring back previous model where the Fiori floorplans were part of the WYSIWYG Web IDE and the annotation files were separate. Imagine something like Swift UI can we get that?

      I am very fed up with CDS because I know there are tools just that it won't work in the other case like say Virtual elements it will work with Fiori not with SALV or Analytics but why?

      table functions can be used in association but not CDS with custom entities so many times we need complex data from BAPI and other old legacy codes...

      And are there any plans to get rid of eclipse and create  abetter tooling. Eclipse ADT is one horrible tool I never love it it freezes restarts and takes so long and these accidents happen mostly when I need quick outcomes.

       

      Regards,

      Prasenjit

       

      Author's profile photo Lars Hvam
      Lars Hvam
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      Note that only one person on the call works for SAP(DJ Adams), the Exercism effort is community driven, so we cannot answer what SAP is planning to do 🙂

      For Eclipse, SAP has communicated many times that its the SAP way.

      However, the community(without SAP) has built multiple ABAP extensions for vscode

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Yeah have heard from some colleagues and need to give it a try but official support? 😉

      I am sorry may be stupid question but after installing MS Visual Studio how can I get ABAP , like in ADT how do I create a project, etc.? Can you provide some help documentation plz?

      Back to the primary topic of your blog- I loved this exorcism thing and how you are making ABAP accessible to masses. It's just amazing and so many new things are being done it's surprising to me I kind of ran away from SCN it looks things are changing. My best wishes.

       

      Come writers and critics
      Who prophesize with your pen
      And keep your eyes wide
      The chance won't come again
      And don't speak too soon
      For the wheel's still in spin
      And there's no tellin' who
      That it's namin'
      For the loser now
      Will be later to win
      For the times they are a-changin'

      • Copyright Bob Dylan 😀
      Author's profile photo Lars Hvam
      Lars Hvam
      Blog Post Author

      if you want official support, then stick to "horrible tool I never love it it freezes restarts and takes so long" 🙂 alternatively, engage in and support the community efforts

      https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=murbani.vscode-abap-remote-fs reuses the ADT REST endpoints

      https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=larshp.vscode-abaplint takes a different approach, and does everything standalone, much like exercism

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Of course I am going to try it out and come back with my experience. This weekend I am going to get it on my machine. Thank you- Lars 🙂

      Author's profile photo Gustavo Damasceno
      Gustavo Damasceno

      I'm a computer engineering student and I only got to know the ABAP language during my internship program at coca-cola. Today, I'm studying and delving into the ABAP language... the exercism platform is helping me a lot.