Although I can understand your point of view, you must understand that creating a web based editor or IDE ( like Thimble ) has a ton of advantages. One being it

Although I can understand your point of view, you must understand that creating a web based editor or IDE ( like Thimble ) has a ton of advantages. One being it helps people learn to code. It helps them in this because they don't have to install and editor, they don't have to configure it and best of all the don't have to install and configure their development environment. All a user has to do is sign in, pick a language and start coding, it literally takes less then a minute. Also the fact that they can collaborate in real time and get help from a friend, is not a small feature to have for them. Although this may not sound appealing to you...their are many people where these features will make or break their initiative to start coding. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the Cloud IDE - Codeanywhere.com