There may not be as much of a balancing act. The gap that needs to be minimized, I believe, is the gap between deciding to start and being able to produce actu

There may not be as much of a balancing act. The gap that needs to be minimized, I believe, is the gap between deciding to start and being able to produce actual usable stuff. So, for example, the use of shared hosting that mapped PHP to web routes meant that you could get started and immediately create actual websites on the internet. Having to do that manually via setting up Apache, etc., makes that gap significantly larger. OTOH, an online REPL lets you see the results of your code, but doesn’t actually let you create actual programs that you could use. Whereas setting up a local environment means that you can immediately create Python scripts that you can actually use. An online REPL, in this way, only adds to the gap between someone deciding to start and creating real usable outputs.