4 ms·

Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering

fossuser 5y ago
I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues. Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization. All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.
- aszen 5y ago
  Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment. They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    > "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.
    - aszen 5y ago
      If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay. Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff
      - curryst 5y ago
        That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo? I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier. Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?

I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues. Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization. All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.

aszen 5y ago
Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment. They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.
- fossuser 5y ago
  > "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.
  - aszen 5y ago
    If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay. Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff
    - curryst 5y ago
      That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo? I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier. Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?