Why the negativity? I think Repl.it is a great place to prototype ideas and work on things without needing to spin up an entire environment on your computer. I think of it like a scratchpad, and with some of their new functionality, it's also become somewhat of a CodePen type platform where you can host tech demos and fun projects—all for free.
I've used Repl.it ever since it became publicly available and I've used it to teach some classes and camps. As a college student, it's also a great environment to quickly open a coding scratchpad to do the occasional LeetCode problem and share my solution with others.
"...work on things without needing to spin up an entire environment on your computer"
For me "spinning up the entire environment" comes to clicking the icon of whatever IDE I decide to run for whatever task I am about to do. Is it such a big trouble?
I understand that it has good value for teaching to the point until students have to accomplish something more serious then some glorified "Hello World".
As for access from anywhere - I can access my development workstations remotely from anywhere with no problems (thanks to NoMAchine ond/or RDP) but since I also lug my super duper laptop anywhere I rarely need to enable this kind of access.
But then again I am a cloud luddite. I own all my computing/development resources (well I rent some remote dedicated servers for backup/standby purposes). Other people have different attitude which is fine. I just hate the idea of my stuff residing/being controlled by any other entity but myself.
I do not perceive those as mutually exclusive. Both are good but for a different things. It does seem to me however that anything not cloud/web based is becoming anathema in some circles.
I have access to the Codespaces beta, but my friends (also in college) and I have struggled to find a usecase for it. It's a bit too hard to setup for one-off explorations/experiments (like Repl.it).
In the past, I've used cloud IDEs like Cloud9 and CodeAnywhere, mainly because I worked on the school computers in high school. But other than that, I don't know why a regular dev or even a college student might use this. Although one usecase may be easily-usable special-purpose programming environments for higher-level college courses that might otherwise require a ton of local setup. And the tight integration with Github might actually make sense for that setting.
Weird to see you downvoted on a forum called "Hacker" News. Who would actually use repl.it to build apps as opposed to the traditional way of having your text editor + compilers installed on a machine you own? I think repl.it is great for prototyping or teaching, but it is NOT the "best place to build your apps". I would doubt repl.it engineers even use it to design their software.
You see this with all "ad" posts. There are outrageously positive comments, someone who works on the project magically appears in the thread and are happy to answer your questions, there are bunch of anecdotal "ads", etc.
So many of these threads feel like a team of "social media workers" are manipulating it.
In most threads, HN hates centralization, loves privacy and loves personal control. In ad related threads, they love centralization, have no care for privacy and love giving up more control.
What could be more hacker-like than managing to string together a set of technologies like web browsers, HTTP/WebSockets and containers to let people develop apps?
If people can build apps on Google Forms + IFTT/Zapier or on Bubble.is etc then an entire programming environment plus database seems like it should be enough to build things on too.
Yeah, they seem to be a good place to build apps, but certainly not better than my local dev environment where I have total control over my packages and commands. E.g. some of these are restricted or not even supported in repl.it: sudo, dnf/apt-get, Vim plugins
I've used Repl.it ever since it became publicly available and I've used it to teach some classes and camps. As a college student, it's also a great environment to quickly open a coding scratchpad to do the occasional LeetCode problem and share my solution with others.