Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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repl.it is a nice take on this problem:

https://repl.it/

I was impressed by the low latency (at least as of a few months ago). If you make a web app right, it can be faster than a resource-hogging local IDE!

I don't use it myself every day because I've already been using vim/screen/bash for 15+ years. Those are my lightweight REPLs.

But if I were advising someone to code, and they wanted to skip the dev env, I would probably try repl.it. They also have impressive concurrent editing facilities in any language.

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I also think the question is malformed, because I would hesitate to say there's any "single problem" in software development. It's all death by a thousand paper cuts.

The "dev env" problem is real, but it's really a problem with 100+ different tools. It's an architecture/ecosystem problem.

repl.it has some creative solutions to these problems, though it's still a ton of work. I think they are doing great but it's not going to solve all problems.

For example, another popular dev env is for data science or machine learning researchers. RStudio is doing some good stuff there, and there's Google colab, etc.

Software development is very big diverse and it's hard to imagine one solution cutting across all of it.

Thanks so much for the mention. It's indeed a lot of work, but we've done so much with such a small team and it's only accelerating as we layer all of our solutions on top of each other. We're solving one problem at a time with focus on patterns and abstractions that makes it easily extensible and could support virtually any language.

With the Universal Package Manager (https://github.com/replit/upm) we're trying to encode the best practices in package management behind a single easy-to-use interface. One of the most fun features is that you can `import` or `require` a package and we'll just guess what you want to do, install the dependencies for you, generate a spec and lock file.

With prybar (https://github.com/replit/prybar) we're trying to create a universal interactive programming experience that behaves roughly the same for every language.

And, to be open-sourced soon, our window-tiling manager and workspace (https://repl.it/blog/ide), we're trying to build a framework that makes it so easy to build complex, plugin-based environments, such as IDEs, very easy to build.

We also leverage a lot of awesome open-source projects and standards, like the Language Server Protocol by VSCode/Microsoft, that abstract over language features and makes it easy to provide an amazing experience across languages.

Edit: if it's been a few months since you tried Repl.it, give it another try, we've made a lot of progress since then. Multiplayer is now out of beta, we have Git integration, and we've done a lot to make it faster and more reliable.

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