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Paul Graham on Replit's Growth

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53 pointsamasad37 comments

I teach an AP CS A class at a Bay Area school. In previous years, the class would have students write and run Java on their own computers.

This year, given the remote nature, the class has completely transitioned to using Repl.it. We publish assignments and projects on it (and have also tried syncing with Github classroom to give more in-depth comments for each commit), and also demonstrate new topics by pulling up a blank Repl.it and live coding.

While there have been hiccups and days when the service crashed during class, it has for the most part exceeded our (my co-teachers and I) expectations.

I appreciate that they have a vibrant community. There seem to be lots of tinkerers/hackers on the platform who are doing weird, interesting things (I saw a Python implementation of a text-based Among Us game the other day [1] and a turkey translator [2]). There are also other CS teachers who have published their exercises/projects on Repl.it free to use or remix.

There are also a number of tutorials (i.e., here's one for this year's Advent of Code Day 1 [3]). These give me favorable impressions of the active community.

I don't have any comments on their long-term path to profitability and growth, but the personal experiences I've had with it have been mostly positive so far.

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[1] https://repl.it/talk/share/GAME-ROOMS-Among-Us-ALPHA/79187

[2] https://repl.it/talk/share/Turkey-Translator/82208

[3] https://repl.it/talk/learn/Advent-of-Code-1-Walkthrough/8353...

Hi carls! Sorry about the crashes. You'd be happy to know that we've focused on quality (https://blog.repl.it/quality) the past couple of months and made tremendous progress (https://blog.repl.it/how-far).

You can always email me (amjad@repl.it) with feedback.

Speaking of text-based Among Us, checkout among-sus.

https://sr.ht/~martijnbraam/among-sus/

Anyone know what their 30-day users looks like? It seems like a lot of people created accounts to try it, and this is growing, but it doesn't tell us anything about churn.

I teach computer science, and love the growth of these cloud-based IDE/compiling tools because it's a good backup for students who can't get their programming environment set up in a remote class during the pandemic. It's much harder to figure out package dependency and configuration issues when you can't take over the keys to check out their programming environment.

I used repl.it for a class and it worked out nicely, where I could set up a template with data and code and the students could fork it. The one thing that made me not renew past a month is their receipts say "Hacker" on it as your purchase (it's one of their pricing levels), and it was awkward getting a reimbursement from the university for that. Even handing a receipt saying that I purchased "Hacker" (without much context) made me hesitate.

I’m fairly certain that’s an indictment of your university instead of Repl.it.

Finance departments are so silly-- wanting a receipt to explain what is actually being purchased in some kind of understandable language!

They want you to buy the "Team for Education" level for $35/mo which offers your students unlimited "multiplayer", letting you drop into their individual notebooks during class, etc.

That's what I'd be curious about too. I made an account to check it out, but didn't use it after that.

I also suspect if people are linking to it in tutorials as a way to get an immediate environment there might be a lot of new signups that don't stick around.

Is anyone on HN using this consistently day-to-day for something?

I used to use it in college to program at the library. I haven't used it in at least 5 years though. I believe it was also useful to learn a new language in an environment where I couldn't install software.

I still use it occasionally as a scratchpad for working things out, especially in languages I'm not as familiar with. Figuring out how to use a standard library function, class inheritance behavior, edge cases like null handling.

I definitely don't see myself ever needing to pay for their product. I'd guess the play is to get into B2B or EDU as a hiring or education platform.

For context, the hn post was submitted by replit’s founder.

Yeah, this is a meaningless number without additional context.

I'm reminded of a project a while back where the business only cared about user acquisition...not retention. It does not exist any longer, and was never profitable. But they exceeded their target numbers every quarter (until it was killed by upper management for having no path to profitability)

Cloud based ides make me feel uncomfortable. Do companies really want their developers dependent on a web app being online? Isn’t sublime so much faster than a web app? Are there IP issues to worry about from the “we can change our TOS at any time with no notice” clauses on these sites? Won’t the data be really tempting to sell one day? Maybe I’m just not the target audience for it

Or, to play a recent meme, “no coding today... because us-east-1 is down.”

I tried to spin up a repl.it session for the first time yesterday, with the intent to hack on clojure solutions to Advent of Code 2020. After a while I just got pretty frustrated battling the editor's default/only formatting settings. Maybe I missed something, but they seem badly mismatched to how clojure code (and I'd say lisp generally) is normally formatted, it felt like writing clojure in a javascript editor.

I used repl.it when first learning Scheme years ago and remember it being okay. But after using emacs or Cursive, I couldn't imagine writing in a Lisp without being able to slurp/barf at the very least.

This level of user engagement is fantastic but does it translate to actual revenue growth? Or is this only a hockey stick of expenses that will eventually run the company dry?

Careful, this graph does not show user engagement, only registered users over time. Maybe 90% of users create an account for a one-timer then forget about the service.

I'm surprised PG is commenting on registered users and exponential curves. Do you really think they are all programers? Why are we not seeing a graph for DAU?

He's just pushing some stock that he owns.

Accessibility link: https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1334178824121147392

It seems very focused on Python (not that there is anything wrong with that.) I tried to see if I could run a very basic Java Servlet application and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it work. Again, nothing wrong with that but it isn't as flexible as having a working local development environment.

One thing that always perplexed me about repl.it is the actual domain. .IT is (was?) supposed to be reserved to businesses and individuals based in Italy, but Repl.it is definitely not (all their job ads are for SF). Did TLD rules in Italy change, or are they dodging them with some fictitious shell company?

There are numerous options to resolve that and stay fully within the rules, including having an agent represent you and purchase the domain. It is not reserved for businesses in Italy.

This is from their FAQ:

"The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland."

So uhm, dodging it is. That wording is somewhat more lax than I remember, last I checked it required actual residence or VAT registration in the country. Then again, I guess it’s a bit more money for local companies...

A good chunk of country specific TLDs are no longer specific to countries, similar to how .org/.net moved on from their original uses.

I know, I was just surprised because .it used to be fairly strict (I’m Italian but I’ve lived abroad for a long time, so it was annoying for me). It looks like they’ve since relaxed the rules so that anybody in EU or with Italian citizenship can register, which is a weird halfway measure but I guess it wouldn’t feel like Italy without some meaningless bureaucracy.

Started using Repl.it some years ago, then moved to Google colab - mainly because I use Python. Colab feels a lot smother, but I'll fire up Repl when tinkering with other languages.

Does anyone know if there is an opensource self-hosted equivalent?

I'd love to install it on my NAS for the kids to play/experiment with..

just another product that will be killed by a vscode plugin

Maybe not by a vscode plugin, but possibly by vscode itself.

One thing I've noticed about web IDEs I've used in the past, be it Nitrous, Cloud9 or others is that they start with the idea of web IDE and then they make it a good IDE.

VScode was first a good editor that everyone enjoys using and then it started moving to web. If at some point vscode becomes a fully integrated web IDE like repl.it or cloud9 I think it will sweep competition just because it has a massive number of desktop users

That would be my worry. VSCode for all its faults works well and is lightweight. Make VSCode tightly integrate with github, where you never even have the code locally, and can build and test via the IDE nicely... amazing, never even have to setup the environment or pull the code down.

I am temped to apply for their SRE role, but I have a fairly cushy role as is, so probably not.

That’s exactly what GitHub Codespaces provides: https://github.com/features/codespaces.

I think that they’re completely different things.

No need for VS Code with repl.it at all.

and/or VS code in the browser

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