Welcome!

Verse is a browser-based coding tool that makes it simple to create programs and games and share them with others.

Verse is designed with beginners in mind. It’s a great way to start learning to code. But even professional programmers will find it useful for sketching ideas, performing code katas, or bringing their side projects to life.

Try it out! Here’s a simple program you can copy-paste to get started.

define({
  *run() {
    let name = yield waitForInput("Hello! What's your name?")
    yield log('Nice to meet you, ' + name + '!')
    yield wait(1)
    yield retry(run())
  }
})

Downloads

In addition to accessing Verse online, you can download past versions from the releases page. Just click the link for the verse.html file of the version you want.

To use the file, open it in a web browser. On most systems, you can double-click the file to open it.

Once you’ve downloaded a copy of Verse, you can use it anywhere—even without an Internet connection!

Documentation

You can find the Verse Documentation, including “getting started” tutorials and a reference manual, here.

Guiding Principles

We value simplicity, speed, beauty, and openness. The principles Verse uses to support these values are described below.

• Just Code. Verse apps don’t use HTML or CSS, so you only have to learn one language: JavaScript.
• Immediate Feedback. Many programming tools make you wait a lot—for programs to start, tests to run, webpages to load. This makes it harder to know whether the code you just wrote is going to work, and harder to debug when you have a problem. We believe the best amount of time to spend waiting is zero, and Verse gets as close as humanly possible to that goal.
• Room to Grow. It’s easy to write toy programs in Verse, but it’s just as easy to grow them into real, useful software. Verse is designed to scale seamlessly from 10 lines of code to 10,000.
• Open Source. The code powering Verse is free for anyone to inspect, use, and remix, and its history is saved on Github. Verse will always remain free for anyone to use. It will grow and change, but you’ll always be able to use an older version of it if you really want to.
• Private. We take data privacy seriously. There’s no sneaky code in Verse phoning home with data about you. Your code is stored only on your device, until you choose to share it with the world.
• Works Offline. Not everyone has access to fast Internet all the time. Once you’ve accessed the Verse site, it’s stored on your device so you can use it even without an Internet connection.
• Non Nova, sed Nove. That’s Latin for “not new things, but new ways.” Verse doesn’t try to make up new programming languages or syntax. The patterns you’ll learn from using Verse are inspired by state-of-the-art programming tools like React and Redux. Verse simply turns up the good in these existing technologies. As a result, the things you learn from Verse will be useful for the rest of your programming career.

And, perhaps most importantly…

• Fun. Writing code and making stuff work should be fun. Verse aims to maximize the joy of programming while minimizing its frustrations.