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Comment by topcat31 | Hacker News Reader

Mentioned Glitch and Replit in the article - they're great and I love them but there's still something missing about relying on these platforms imho. I think cementing a default coding environment right into the browser would make it a lot more accessible - and actually be much closer to real coding where you're manipulating files and running code.

Plus: glitch/replit are quite slow to do any real coding inside of vs developing locally.

But maybe the future really is in the browser in this way.

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But why stop there? Let’s bundle something like Excel or Powerpoint, or Photoshop or Final Cut.

If we’re deciding to bundle additional software with a browser, why would a programming environment (chosen based on someone’s favorite language) be top priority?

They already put entire desktop environments in some two decades ago. It never took off.

With good reasons at the time -- browsers were slow and heavy. Now we have (among others) the V8 Javascript engine and insanely fast client computers (all of any recent desktop, laptop, and mobile device)

Browsers are slower and heavier than they ever were. V8… you could argue it's faster, if you neglect warm-up time, but even it is heavier.

acknowledged, but in my experience they are way quicker than 1990s / 2000s browsers

Because installing Excel is simple already

Install excel and nodejs. Then evaluate which was easier. I suspect node will win by a wide margin.

Already did. The author found that installing Node.js needs knowledge about the command line while Excel just needs a few clicks of "Next" (I just did it yesterday)

Node.js could improve their installer, would that solve all of OPs complaints?

Probably.

Partially. OP also wrote that he want's a JS IDE bundled.

Having installed excel and node countless times I can safely say excel is harder to install.

Imagine if there was some kind of runtime the browser shipped with that could let developers create all kind of applications that are downloaded and run on demand. That would be pretty cool.

If you open the dev tools in your browser there's a full sandbox environment right there, not to mention the load of other sites available. I don't see why specifically Node should be installed.

I just wrote a bunch of code inside Chrome devtools to do some web scraping. It works pretty well, with a REPL, (overly aggressive) autocomplete, and good integration with the DOM, but it's also limited.

Saving and loading .js files uses a very non-standard flow. The editor is OK but I think basic operations like "find across files" are missing. It's very "canned" and not customizable.

In other words, it feels more like a debugging environment than a programming environment, which I think is basically what they were going for.

Not only that, but if you set up Workspaces in Chrome (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/work...) you can edit files stored on your computer using devtools, making it even more like an IDE.

Agreed, the much stronger counterargument is that all major browsers already have JS development environments built in! I am curious to hear why this is not suitable for the author.

I think you're craving a 21st century version of Emacs, where the development environment is baked into the product. I agree it's awesome, and I think the browser comes the closest, but you're right, it's not there yet. I fear the reason is mostly security: browsers are used by billions, but Emacs benefits from relative obscurity.

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