This is my calling. I'm the cofounder of Repl.it and I've dedicated my career to solving this problem.
Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif
Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused speed of setting up and taking the drudgery out of cross-platform mobile dev. And before that I was a founding engineer at Codecademy where we were attacking the same problem from an education angle.
With Repl.it, however, we're determined to simultaneously solve the "getting started" problem while scaling the environment to allow real work. It's incredibly challenging but we've made great progress. If anyone is interested in working with us, collaborating, or if you're simply passionate about this problem and want to chat then I'd love to hear from you: amjad@repl.it
I love Repl.it and taught my daughter python there. Can you please make a self hosted version? I think the only thing I've seen is that maybe sometime in the future you'll have it.
As long as my critical infrastructure and tools depend on someone else's computer, I'm nothing more than a (potentially well-paid) sharecropper.
In fact, I think that's a valid answer to the question posed by the headline. Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers. This is a social problem, not an engineering problem, but unlike many other social problems the solution will have to be engineering-driven.
In more concrete terms, that means being able to self-host your tools.
> As long as my critical infrastructure and tools depend on someone else's computer, I'm nothing more than a (potentially well-paid) sharecropper.
I heartily agree. There are so many new tools and things that are interesting concepts, that I don't try because there is no offline/self-hosted version available.
Current example (but can be replaced by a myriad of other tools, this is not specific to 'em): Notion. Apparently could be adopted into my personal knowledge management, has some interesting features most of the software I've seen so far does not, but why would I ever invest even a moment of time to pay the costs of using the system (let alone the membership fees etc.) if one day, poof, it's gone, like Frank Sinatra, like WiiWare, like Microsoft eBooks, like Google Reader.
> Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers.
This is what we need to return to. Look at the open-source manifestos, FSF documents, heck even certain sections in the Windows 9x User interface guides and .NET Framework design guidelines indicate that the user should always be the focus, the user should be the one in control.
That gif is a really excellent demo. I'd been mislead by your name - I assumed you were all about Jupyter-style REPL consoles. I didn't realise how much closer you were to Glitch.
We started as just an editor and a console -- I initially modeled it after the Dr Scheme REPL (now Racket) -- but our users wanted more. Kids who learned to code using our repl wanted to use it to build and publish apps so we evolved the product towards becoming more of an IDE while trying to keep the simplicity.
Check out our community as well, lots of hackers, especially young ones, sharing and collaborating on code: https://repl.it/talk
Focused on simplicity, speed, and generality. They do really well on frontend and client-side execution. Our speciality, on the other hand, is language support and containers/general dev environments.
Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif
Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused speed of setting up and taking the drudgery out of cross-platform mobile dev. And before that I was a founding engineer at Codecademy where we were attacking the same problem from an education angle.
With Repl.it, however, we're determined to simultaneously solve the "getting started" problem while scaling the environment to allow real work. It's incredibly challenging but we've made great progress. If anyone is interested in working with us, collaborating, or if you're simply passionate about this problem and want to chat then I'd love to hear from you: amjad@repl.it