Ask HN: Chromebooks for web development | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Chromebooks for web development

6 pointsehutch793 comments

So chromebooks are finally hitting the market. Obviously they're great for anything you can do with just a web browser. However, are they of any use for actually creating web apps?

Would getting one of these be of any use to a django developer? I know there are web based editors, but has any thought been put into how this would work, or should i just stick with a macbook?

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I'm a django developer and I received one of these as part of the pilot program. I tried to use it as my main machine for a while, it does have a very limited terminal, so I was able to SSH into my servers and do stuff that way, but overall I just found myself too restricted to really get things done like I could on my normal workstation. ChromeOS itself is pretty slick, although the CR48 pilot chromebooks were a bit slow for some things, general browsing was fine. I won't be using one for my development machine any time soon, although if they get the HTML5 Netflix player working we may end up with a few more of these in our household.

With all due respect to some awesome people who built online IDEs, editors, etc, they are still not there yet.

With a chromebook you can't have an editor of your choice. What about a source control? How do you run locally your app? There are other problems still not solved with a developer stack in the cloud. Personally, I still can't imagine my dev environment without a great editor and a shell. And no online solution comes near that.

With that said, just a couple of years back, I couldn't imagine having my email in the cloud, so I believe in the future someone more imaginative than me could revolutionize development. I just hope they port Vim to the cloud :)

Why everyone seems to be wanting to use INFERIOR tools in the tech world baffles me. Why in the world would you ever want to do development on the web? You have no control over your development environment. Its almost as bad as the iPad needing a special case so that it can have the same ergonomics as a laptop.

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