6 ms·

Whenever I see Repl product announcements, I'm reminded of this quote from Paul Graham. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed,

Whenever I see Repl product announcements, I'm reminded of this quote from Paul Graham. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli. I wonder if there's something similar going on with Repl, and if so, what their end goal is.

tyingq 6y ago
Cloudflare seems to be on a similar path with their edge workers and KV store. No web IDE, but they do have a client side tool called wrangler that's integrated with all that.
darkhorse13 6y ago
I love this comment because after reading it, I feel strongly that something like this is definitely going on with Repl.it. The potential of the product definitely seems huge, and it feels like we have not even seen the full picture yet.
- Aearnus 6y ago
  Seconded. There's definitely something deeper going on here, and I'm so excited to see it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jameslk 6y ago
The end goal is to move the IDE and all development tooling to the cloud (similar to what GitHub Codespaces is trying to do). All editor defaults, build tools, linting, environment best practices, etc will be provided for you without all the ceremony of setting it up. This will make it easier for new team members to be productive from day 1 and it will allow you to have multiple development environments for each branch of work. The realization is that if you control the development environment, by introducing seamless integrations with your hosting through things like easy-to-use databases (i.e. vendor lock-in), you also have control over the hosting of applications. That's a pretty lucrative business as we've seen with AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. Also, there's a trend towards low code/no code, so everything is becoming tiny microservices integrated with other SaaS solutions. Something like Repl.it can help you with the "last mile" of development work when you need build something lightweight and quick.
- pampa 6y ago
  I just thought that i feel like a medieval guild craftsman must have felt during the industrial revolution. We did have all this sharp and complicated tools we installed and configured on our laptops ourselves, spent years in apprenticeship just to learn now to awk or exit vim. Passed the secret knowledge to our own padawans. And now they are replacing it with what? An IDE in a browser??? that you can just point to and start writing code? just like that??? 8-)
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    Who will create these new applications? Who will manage them, optimize them, secure them? And with what? Crappy online text editors with 1% of the features of the tools you are used too?
    - User23 6y ago
      Poorly written, but your desire for software freedom is admirable. There are very real concerns about computer users' freedoms with cloud based development. This isn't even new, it's why GPL3 is a thing. That the new license was an utter failure doesn't mean it was the wrong idea, it just means it was too late.
      - gramakri 6y ago
        Are you replying to the wrong comment?
      - keeganpoppen 6y ago
        > Poorly written, but your software freedom is admirable who starts a comment this way? what condescending bullshit. i guess i'll start my comment this way: you're a douchenozzle, and the point you raised was barely relevant to the comment whose quality you're editorializing
        dang 6y ago
        Please don't post like this. It just makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
smichel17 6y ago
This is slightly off topic for the thread, but it's always seemed to me that this is Google and The Internet, where the search engine is their "todo-list".

tyingq 6y ago

Cloudflare seems to be on a similar path with their edge workers and KV store. No web IDE, but they do have a client side tool called wrangler that's integrated with all that.

darkhorse13 6y ago

I love this comment because after reading it, I feel strongly that something like this is definitely going on with Repl.it. The potential of the product definitely seems huge, and it feels like we have not even seen the full picture yet.

Aearnus 6y ago
Seconded. There's definitely something deeper going on here, and I'm so excited to see it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jameslk 6y ago

The end goal is to move the IDE and all development tooling to the cloud (similar to what GitHub Codespaces is trying to do). All editor defaults, build tools, linting, environment best practices, etc will be provided for you without all the ceremony of setting it up. This will make it easier for new team members to be productive from day 1 and it will allow you to have multiple development environments for each branch of work. The realization is that if you control the development environment, by introducing seamless integrations with your hosting through things like easy-to-use databases (i.e. vendor lock-in), you also have control over the hosting of applications. That's a pretty lucrative business as we've seen with AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. Also, there's a trend towards low code/no code, so everything is becoming tiny microservices integrated with other SaaS solutions. Something like Repl.it can help you with the "last mile" of development work when you need build something lightweight and quick.

pampa 6y ago
I just thought that i feel like a medieval guild craftsman must have felt during the industrial revolution. We did have all this sharp and complicated tools we installed and configured on our laptops ourselves, spent years in apprenticeship just to learn now to awk or exit vim. Passed the secret knowledge to our own padawans. And now they are replacing it with what? An IDE in a browser??? that you can just point to and start writing code? just like that??? 8-)
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Who will create these new applications? Who will manage them, optimize them, secure them? And with what? Crappy online text editors with 1% of the features of the tools you are used too?
  - User23 6y ago
    Poorly written, but your desire for software freedom is admirable. There are very real concerns about computer users' freedoms with cloud based development. This isn't even new, it's why GPL3 is a thing. That the new license was an utter failure doesn't mean it was the wrong idea, it just means it was too late.
    - gramakri 6y ago
      Are you replying to the wrong comment?
    - keeganpoppen 6y ago
      > Poorly written, but your software freedom is admirable who starts a comment this way? what condescending bullshit. i guess i'll start my comment this way: you're a douchenozzle, and the point you raised was barely relevant to the comment whose quality you're editorializing
      - dang 6y ago
        Please don't post like this. It just makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

smichel17 6y ago

This is slightly off topic for the thread, but it's always seemed to me that this is Google and The Internet, where the search engine is their "todo-list".