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by applecrazy 2101 days ago
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.
2 comments
FpUser 2101 days ago
"...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.

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Stratoscope 2101 days ago
I have all of my favorite IDEs ready to run on a click - a few JetBrains ones, VS Code and Visual Studio, etc.

I still use Repl.it if I want to try out something in a hurry, or especially if I want to post a code sample for one of my Stack Overflow answers.

Both of these options are great! It's not one vs. another.

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FpUser 2100 days ago
>"It's not one vs. another."

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.

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kyawzazaw 2101 days ago
How does GitHub codespaces factor in?
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applecrazy 2101 days ago
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.

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kyawzazaw 2100 days ago
I believe it is useful for Chromebooks, replicating dev setup especially for opensource projects.
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