Agree 100%. I teach a Programming for Non Programmers class using Sinatra. Typically I'll have all 24 people setup with a "Hello World" app in about 30 minute

Agree 100%. I teach a Programming for Non Programmers class using Sinatra. Typically I'll have all 24 people setup with a "Hello World" app in about 30 minutes. Even with 2 TAs, I can't even imagine the alternative of trying to get an entire class of programming newbies running ruby locally across Mac and Windows without any problems or leaving anyone behind. It's easy as a developer to underestimate the difficulty of getting things set up. Even in nitrous the most common problem I have to debug during class is people not being in the right directory because they have to use 'cd workspace' before they can 'ruby helloworld.rb'. There's just a giant set of knowledge that we developers rely on to even do the simplest of tasks, and nitrous lets me skip over all that boring stuff and get right to the interesting concepts they can see on their screen like paths, params, request handlers, views and links. My only complaint is the onboarding UX uses some confusing wording/concepts for beginners like "boxes" and "hostnames" and energy credits. I just handhold everyone through that part so it must be really difficult for someone trying to load it up themselves. When I found some bugs I had the chance to talk with the guys behind nitrous and they were really helpful with trying to figure out what went wrong and how they can simplify the flow, so hopefully we'll see some improvements there with the new round of funding.