Who is Otter for?

Otter is designed for people who want programs they can read, write and trust - whether or not they have programmed before.

People new to programming

If you have never written code, Otter lets you concentrate on ideas - values, choices, repetition - instead of punctuation. The first program is one line, and every error message tells you what to try next.

Windows users who automate

Renaming files, organizing folders, reading CSV, calling a web service, running other programs and capturing their output: these are plain statements in Otter, without learning a shell language first.

People building small tools and apps

A window with a button, a small web application, an API endpoint, a data viewer. Otter covers desktop and web interfaces with the same readable statements.

Teachers and learners

Because programs read like sentences, a teacher can read a student program aloud and ask what it means. Otter is small enough to learn end to end.

Not for everyone, yet

Otter is not designed for performance-critical systems programming, and its ecosystem of libraries is young. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, but desktop windows need Windows: on macOS and Linux, build interfaces as web applications.