4 ms·

While I love Python, and I love the idea of autocomplete everywhere for everything, I'm curious why not do the same thing, but for Java/TypeScript? PS I really

While I love Python, and I love the idea of autocomplete everywhere for everything, I'm curious why not do the same thing, but for Java/TypeScript? PS I really like the layout of your transcript. I would imagine that was done by hand? It would be especially cool to auto-generate transcripts like this. Suggestion - making the images clickable so that we can see the code frags better.

meredydd 6y ago
1. The people who are most "shut out" by the complexity of the web do not, by definition, speak Javascript. These are the folks who need Anvil most! Most people who speak JS already know web-dev (why else would you learn JS?) 2. Python is the most popular language that isn't JS. It's used for teaching almost everywhere, it's used for data science, it's used on the back-end, even embedded code... 3. We wanted to start with an "island of sanity". If you google "how to do X in JS", you'll find StackOverflow and end up tweaking a DOM node, or making an HTTP request, or grabbing something else that breaks the abstraction and brings back the traditional Web hairball. We want to make it easy to escape, of course (I wrote an whole essay about that[0]), but not so easy that you wander out of it without realising, and then find that the autocompleter no longer understands all of your project. [0] https://anvil.works/blog/escape-hatches-and-ejector-seats https://anvil.works/blog/escape-hatches-and-ejector-seats 4. People who speak JS have already invested in the web - they've paid the price, got the scars, and probably have more than a little of their professional capital invested in "being a web developer". We want to win them over in the end, of course, but they would have been a very hard target market for an MVP!
- localhost 6y ago
  Good on you for focusing on establishing a beachhead customer! Hope things work out with that initial cohort.

meredydd 6y ago

1. The people who are most "shut out" by the complexity of the web do not, by definition, speak Javascript. These are the folks who need Anvil most! Most people who speak JS already know web-dev (why else would you learn JS?) 2. Python is the most popular language that isn't JS. It's used for teaching almost everywhere, it's used for data science, it's used on the back-end, even embedded code... 3. We wanted to start with an "island of sanity". If you google "how to do X in JS", you'll find StackOverflow and end up tweaking a DOM node, or making an HTTP request, or grabbing something else that breaks the abstraction and brings back the traditional Web hairball. We want to make it easy to escape, of course (I wrote an whole essay about that[0]), but not so easy that you wander out of it without realising, and then find that the autocompleter no longer understands all of your project. [0] https://anvil.works/blog/escape-hatches-and-ejector-seats https://anvil.works/blog/escape-hatches-and-ejector-seats 4. People who speak JS have already invested in the web - they've paid the price, got the scars, and probably have more than a little of their professional capital invested in "being a web developer". We want to win them over in the end, of course, but they would have been a very hard target market for an MVP!

localhost 6y ago
Good on you for focusing on establishing a beachhead customer! Hope things work out with that initial cohort.