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Comment by axxl | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out the advantages of this over a regular IDE, etc. Simply the fact that it's all on the cloud? What problem are you trying to solve? (I don't mean to sound interrogative, I'm just genuinely curious about your motivation behind this). It certainly looks neat and will check it out for myself.

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I think there are some interesting upsides.. I already really love collaborating with GitHub.. the opportunity to take things a step further, pair-program remotely, or fix a unit test from a computer not running a full development environment might be pretty cool.

That is true. I know someone else brought up integration with version control systems (Edit: I see from the blog it's something they're working towards). Furthermore, I'm curious if it allows for offline work on the code as well (if you're going to be riding a train, and you want to download the latest version, edit it, and then reupload). Though I guess with the increasing availability of internet access everywhere this might become less of an issue.

We do have a feature that allows you to Import and Export from the IDE. So before you get on the train just export and once you have internet access just import.

There are advantages to an online IDE. Being able to code from any computer or mobile device without synchronizing your code is a nice one. No hardware issues, like coding for a Windows system on a Mac and vice versa. At some point we'd like to integrate the ability to actually code for mobile devices, for example coding an iPhone application all from your Windows computer.

I'm not exactly a programmer (I've written some really cool Matlab code and I make SAS do nifty things, but no real languages other than dabbling in java) and getting the environment set up is a big intimidator to trying a new language (it took me 20 hours to get AS3 to compile and I never got box2d to work). I'm now tempted to try at least one or two on compilr.

Awesome give us a shot!

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