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Comment by gver10 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing per se against repl.it, but I'm surprised to see this on #1 of the front page as it's basically a call to free labour. Will there ever be a future when companies innovate themselves again? IMHO all these "hackathons" or "jams" are really just about finding use cases for their product and getting it tested for a very affordable reward ...

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Repl.it is an amazing idea, but it's infuriating to use. No syntax highlighting in the REPL, laaaaaag everywhere, hardly any version control… It's useful for performing a 30 second Python interaction on machines without Python installed, but that 30 seconds becomes 3 minutes because Repl.it is so clunky.

I tried to log in to check whether things had improved, but apparently I need Google's permission to do so now? And, in fact, nothing will run without allowing Google's JavaScript, even once I've logged in.

Anyway, version control is there now, and you can edit existing Git repos! Except it's actually GitHub, not Git, so I can't use it for any of my existing projects, including my programming language…

That being said, I think the world is better with Repl.it in it. It's not like these other things I criticise where I think we're better off without them; Repl.it's flaws are infuriating because they're stopping me from appreciating something potentially great.

> Repl.it is an amazing idea, but it's infuriating to use. No syntax highlighting in the REPL, laaaaaag everywhere, hardly any version control… It's useful for performing a 30 second Python interaction on machines without Python installed, but that 30 seconds becomes 3 minutes because Repl.it is so clunky.

We've improved performance a lot and we'll keep working on it. I just timed it and it took me 5 seconds to start a new Python repl and execute code :)

> I tried to log in to check whether things had improved, but apparently I need Google's permission to do so now? And, in fact, nothing will run without allowing Google's JavaScript, even once I've logged in.

What do you mean by this? You can log-in via Google but that's about it.

> That being said, I think the world is better with Repl.it in it. It's not like these other things I criticise where I think we're better off without them; Repl.it's flaws are infuriating because they're stopping me from appreciating something potentially great.

Thanks we're always happy to hear feedback, negative more important than positive. I'd invite you or anyone who loves Repl.it but find it to be lacking to apply to work with us https://repl.it/jobs

My interpretation of the Google comment is that if you block all JavaScript from Google, Repl.it does not work. Haven’t tried it myself though.

Correct. It's a known issue that all of two people (including me) have ever run across! https://repl.it/feedback/p/make-replit-work-without-google (In reality, the people who submit feedback are a very skewed representation of the population-at-large, so there might actually be three people who've encountered this issue.)

I'm more interested in your response to the paragraph you conspicuously skipped:

> Anyway, version control is there now, and you can edit existing Git repos! Except it's actually GitHub, not Git, so I can't use it for any of my existing projects, including my programming language…

Repl.it is set of automation and UI tools that makes it easy for beginners learn to code and for developers to test or prototype projects.

Any feature that's implemented in the UI is implemented as abstraction over things you can do by opening the shell. Because we are a small team that prizes simplicity over completeness, and because GH is the most popular we just made that the default.

But you can open the shell (command/cntrl+k and type "shell") then use git to your hearts desire :)

We'll probably add native GitLab or whatever others want in the future. You can always leave feedback here and tell us what you want: https://repl.it/feedback

That's excellent to hear! Perhaps I can use it, after all – just as soon as I figure out how to add SSH keys to git, anyway.

I last used Repl.it so long ago, I didn't know that there was a shell. (Which is odd, since I read about how you can technically use arbitrary programming languages by installing them via the shell just a few hours ago…)

Leaving feedback now. (Fortunately, you don't need Google to do that, so I don't need to mess with my browser again.)

OK, that sounds a bit better, but what is both simplest to implement, most generic, and most useful is supporting _Git_, not some half-baked forge site APIs.

It's all actually git. And you can start a local repo without calli g to GitHub. You can just use it in half the time it takes to have this discussion.

Do you have any internships program?

Yes, interns apply and we do hire them (despite not listing any intern-specific roles).

We make all of our money from the education market through our classroom products and believe me teachers don't need more languages to teach nor in a hundred years will they teach a hobbyist language.

So I invite you to provide a compelling case for how this is a call for free labour.

Unless the hobbyist language is created by the teacher :)

I wouldn't say this is a call to free labor. It would be if you were asked to port an existing unsupported language to repl.it (which is how I read it at first). However, this is a contest to reward building your own totally new language (which presumably you were going to do anyways) at least, for some segment of time, on repl.it. I suppose it could be seen as debugging repl.it for free, because this endeavor is likely to break repl.it in so many unforseeable ways.

If you hang around the Repl.it community a bit I think you'd be convinced that this is not their motivation :)

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