[raphaelrk]

This IDE was one of my favorite parts of the class.

You open it in a tab and immediately have an ubuntu instance + file system + terminal + text editor running. It has an excellent GUI, it's fast, if you mess up horribly you can just close your tab and restart the instance, and it's a standard environment for all the students which makes teaching assistants' jobs easier. It's so convenient I've used it instead of my own computer at times.

For more context, the class almost immediately dives into C and later gets into web programming, and being able to open up a tab, create `hello.c`, `CTRL-s`, `make hello`, `./hello`, or quickly run a publically-facing webserver is a great combo of convenient, simple, and realistic. The class used to use a VM which was much more of a hassle to set up, a lot slower, and overall not as nice of an experience. When being taken by 800 students a year at Harvard and hundreds of thousands a year online, that change alone has probably introduced a lot of people to programming.