I am a long time user of repl.it and I think it's great but I do wonder what the expected ROI is here? Call me short sighted, but It's still just a repl. Perhaps it could be sold to GitHub to integrate with Gist?
Towards the end of the post there's a bit about our business.
As we've noticed that more people want to use repl.it for more things: from building websites and apps (250,000 in 6 months) to data science[0] and education, with a growing community of hackers[1] it's becoming a generic computing platform. The fact that the REPL is the main interface is besides the point. We're going to productize our infrastructure that runs all this.
After all, Microsoft started as a Basic interpreter for the Altair[2] ;)
Since you've been using this for a while, maybe you can educate me on the benefit of this over a shell or IDE on my local system? I don't quite get it.
We've occasionally used it when discussing Python X vs Python Y behaviours across separate machines (I don't have 3.6 installed but 3.7, a coworker has 3.6 but no 3.7) and are the kind of questions you just want to quickly check, not create a new virtual environment (under Homebrew on Mac, good luck having 3.6 _and_ 3.7 if you regularly `brew cleanup`...) or spin a docker instance. The coworker also regularly tries Scala stuff there (he's had to code review some simple things to start getting familiar with the language), he seems to like it more than the normal Scala repl (which I use).
It's also handy for funny little languages you may not have (the APL version it has is decent enough, for instance, although I prefer GNU, as the free one)
As we've noticed that more people want to use repl.it for more things: from building websites and apps (250,000 in 6 months) to data science[0] and education, with a growing community of hackers[1] it's becoming a generic computing platform. The fact that the REPL is the main interface is besides the point. We're going to productize our infrastructure that runs all this.
After all, Microsoft started as a Basic interpreter for the Altair[2] ;)
[0]: https://towardsdatascience.com/build-deploy-data-science-pro...
[1]: https://repl.it/talk
[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html