Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

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The end goal is to move the IDE and all development tooling to the cloud (similar to what GitHub Codespaces is trying to do). All editor defaults, build tools, linting, environment best practices, etc will be provided for you without all the ceremony of setting it up. This will make it easier for new team members to be productive from day 1 and it will allow you to have multiple development environments for each branch of work.

The realization is that if you control the development environment, by introducing seamless integrations with your hosting through things like easy-to-use databases (i.e. vendor lock-in), you also have control over the hosting of applications. That's a pretty lucrative business as we've seen with AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.

Also, there's a trend towards low code/no code, so everything is becoming tiny microservices integrated with other SaaS solutions. Something like Repl.it can help you with the "last mile" of development work when you need build something lightweight and quick.

I just thought that i feel like a medieval guild craftsman must have felt during the industrial revolution. We did have all this sharp and complicated tools we installed and configured on our laptops ourselves, spent years in apprenticeship just to learn now to awk or exit vim. Passed the secret knowledge to our own padawans.

And now they are replacing it with what? An IDE in a browser??? that you can just point to and start writing code? just like that??? 8-)

Who will create these new applications?

Who will manage them, optimize them, secure them? And with what? Crappy online text editors with 1% of the features of the tools you are used too?

Poorly written, but your desire for software freedom is admirable. There are very real concerns about computer users' freedoms with cloud based development. This isn't even new, it's why GPL3 is a thing. That the new license was an utter failure doesn't mean it was the wrong idea, it just means it was too late.

Are you replying to the wrong comment?

> Poorly written, but your software freedom is admirable

who starts a comment this way? what condescending bullshit. i guess i'll start my comment this way:

you're a douchenozzle, and the point you raised was barely relevant to the comment whose quality you're editorializing

Please don't post like this. It just makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Vim can be compiled to webasm and run in the browser now, so at least on the text editing front, there’s no reason the web text editor has to run a significant feature deficit compared to desktop.

I predict that at some point in the next five years we’ll start to see more apps that are written with webasm cross-compilation in mind, so that “browser” is just another target architecture, just like MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

At least at this point I don't think the craftsmen need to despair because I don't think the online IDE experience is even close to a good personal setup. It feels more like a solution for devices/locations where you quickly need to get an environment up, which has it's place obviously.

Excellent for teaching and showing examples with pet projects. CodePen is okay for some uses, this is a nice in between. I encountered some difficulty when trying to get a VueJS project wrestled into it since there are assumptions with how components are laid out on FS and how these tools operate.

I've been programming (professionally) for over 20 years. I now do most of my development in Jupyter, and browser-based IDEs are preferable to me in almost every way.

Which language?

Almost all in Python at the moment.

> At least at this point

I think we're only a few years away from browser-based editing being the default. I would definitely be surprised if more than half of the dev work happens in non-browser-based editors come 2030.

As someone who just started teaching a highschool programing class, it's what makes my class even possible right now. I agree I'd rather have things run locally myself, but it is great for getting students up and running fast, and is pretty much the only option I've found for on their Chromebooks.

Honestly, as a data scientist, most of the time when people move to the browser/cloud, I feel more like a michellin chef who's now been told that they now have to cook everything on a george foreman grill.

That I lease from someone else.

Any by the way, it's in their kitchen, not yours.

And the power cord is administrated by someone else.

In all seriousness, there's no fundamental reason why an IDE CAN'T work in a browser. Its just that I feel like we're constantly regressing and this is all just a subtle way for an external corporate to capture me so that I can't opt out. The amount of time i have to spend at work negotiating with other parties/budgets/silos/corps dealing with remote environments and software, when I could have done the whole thing in half the time with a 5k budget on a local machine...

It doesn't feel like we're moving forward...maybe moving back to medieval guild craftsman, because control is being taken out of my hands and I'm forced to sign up to respective software/environment guilds to do my work?

> The amount of time i have to spend at work negotiating with other parties/budgets/silos/corps dealing with remote environments and software, when I could have done the whole thing in half the time with a 5k budget on a local machine...

Ironically, in an enterprise environment with heavily managed internal resources, moving so much to the cloud has exactly the opposite effect on my work.

A lot of this effect will depend on both the preexisting local org structure, and the particular cloud platform(s) you choose and how your org chooses to administer them. But certainly at least most of the big cloud providers seem to try to enable one stop shopping for fairly complete sets of solutions without any more organizational roadblocks than are interposed by your own organization.

Write code? You don’t need to write code. You just need to tie some libraries and micro services together. Writing your own code is so 2010s.

If you define your libraries and micro-services in the context of a macrograph they'll autotie themselves!

In that comparison, I find myself to be a luddite. It's not that the new tools aren't cool or useful. But they come with unacceptable trade-offs around ownership, and tie me into relationships with more third parties I do not want to enter into relationship with.

I suppose the market doesn't care, so I'll keep being a closet neo-luddite until all my tools are replaced with services.

The same, of course, was true about the industrial revolution. The emergence of capitalism forced previously self-sufficient craftsmen into becoming industrial workers, increasing the length of their workday and decreasing their quality of life, while invalidating alternative prospects for employment or life. This left a bad taste with luddites not only because they lost entrenched privileges, but the fact that they lost ownership of their means of production also forced them into a specific social relationship of production, whereas previously they could accept or refuse economic transactions at will.

Yup. And I appreciate what the story implies - that capitalism has brought more than enough to pay humanity back for these inconveniences, creating a golden age of the past 100 years (two world wars and upcoming climate catastrophe notwithstanding).

That said, I worry about what happens in the limit. Are we doomed to life without autonomy and without things to call our own? A life in which everything is leased, where money isn't something you accumulate or spend, but only manage the flow of[0] - money flows in through your job, and flows out to services[1]? A life in which you don't even produce anything yourself, but only provide a fractional (and useless on its own) input to the vast machine of civilization?

I can imagine how this is what we need for humanity to grow and spread among the stars, but at the same time I despair about the loss of what I consider to be core of being human: autonomy, having worth as a unique individual.

Talking about the "means of production" - I'm really starting to love this term. I'm not turning red just yet, but the phrasing nicely encompasses what it's about: owning the means that let you provide value for others (and yourself!) on your own terms, without strings attached. And the strings constrain your life way beyond just limits on your ability to make money. They constrain how you work, and - on the buyer side - they constrain how you live. Because if you don't own the things you use, it's the owners that dictate what you can and cannot do with them - and the things may also stop working if the true owners disappear or stop caring.

--

[0] - The difference between resource management in StarCraft and Total Annihilation, if you like. The former had a standard model of "you collect units of finite resources to your storage, and spend them later"; the latter had infinite resources, but each resource building (a mine, a power plant, etc.) provided some amount of resource per second, and everything else drained these resources at various rates. Buffers were small, so your primary focus was ensuring you produce (just a bit) more than you consume. In my eyes, the world has been moving from StarCraft economy to Total Annihilation economy at every level, including nowadays at personal level. Which I find worrying, though I'm not sure why.

[1] - Then again, maybe this is how things always were, and the change is in perspective, in the mental model?

>And now they are replacing it with what? An IDE in a browser??? that you can just point to and start writing code? just like that??? 8-)

Huh, I don't think so.

VS Code which is "web-ready" is nowhere near to real VS capabilities when it comes to reliable intellisense

People often shit on VS because it's giant and requires something better than $100 PC, but it makes life waaaaaaaaaay easier and nowadays you don't have to buy Resharper because there are free and solid replacements

I only recently saw getpod.io and this is exactly the feeling i had

I guess you meant gitpod.io ?

It’s interesting because AWS squired cloud9 a while back and currently offers something very similar with very little fanfare.

Sometimes the path you take your users through is more important.

Cloud9 was trying to take already established developers and put them into a cloud ide. Repl.it is taking new developers without entrenched habits and hoping they’ll never leave for the traditional local dev environment.

It makes a lot of sense when you view it that way

The problem to me with that approach seems two-fold:

1, companies all expect you to work in the traditional way with local repos etc. All their tooling is geared towards that. If experienced users who set the standards aren't being migrated over, then they'll reinforce that status quo, and so will people who learned on repl but were forced to migrate off (monkey ladder experiment style).

2., using older tools is a point of pride. There's definitely a strain of "if you use repl.it / etc. and not emacs / vim / vscode you're a noob." This obviously is toxic and not great, but it does exist, and acts as another obstacle to online IDE adoption I think.

The article says, "Repl.it is already the best place to build your apps."

I'm sure it's not the best place to build a video rendering app using multithreaded rendering to a video window, or an allocation-free audio synthesis engine supporting real-time scheduling. I think these are basically impossible to achieve client-server, and difficult if implemented in JS+WASM.

I was going to respond with a concern for performance when doing code analysis, large refactors, etc...but that could all be done server side, along with neat things like continuous recompilation, etc. Neat.

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