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by colevscode 3675 days ago
Cool tech, fun toy! I hope it is successful. I think Joel should focus on it's toy-like nature, and potential as a learning tool, rather than trying to build this into a production grade tool.

I spent years building tools for this market between professional devs and non-developers. (Backlift.com and then Brace.io) It's really tough. Most people learning to code are trying to gain transferrable skills that can help them land a job. For them, learning git is a fruitful tangent along the path to shipping. Those that aren't interested in building those transferrable skills probably don't self-identify as developers. Making developer tools for non-developers is tough.

1 comments

> Cool tech, fun toy! I hope it is successful. I think Joel should focus on it's toy-like nature, and potential as a learning tool, rather than trying to build this into a production grade tool.

Agreed, and I think the latter part of the post (the "FAQ") indicates that Joel doesn't see this as a deployment strategy for professional developers...

"Listen, this is not the future of all software development. Professional software development teams will continue to use professional, robust tools like Git and that’s great. But it’s surprising how just having continuous merging and reliable Undo solves the “version control” problem for all kinds of simple coding problems. And it really does create an insanely addictive form of collaboration that supercharges your team productivity."

Basically it's a platform that makes a major trade-off: practically zero accountability in exchange for maximum usability. To us professionals, this doesn't seem like a worthwhile choice. However, to those non-programmers or budding programmers which I believe this product is geared towards, it's a step in the right direction. This feels like it wants to be the "Google Docs" of programming.

I could see this as a great tool for doing coding interviews. You get instant feedback to see if it works, and you can share the results with others almost as a code resume of sorts.