Once they’re all in they’ll pull an all nighter if necessary to get something done.
Things like Repls often turned me off if they left me feeling like the things I was running in them were contrived and ephemeral.
Even if I was producing some cool graphic or something, there was always this nagging feeling that I wasn’t making something “real” that could be saved off and shared. Almost like the difference between messing around with a dry erase board vs learning how to draw with a pencil and a sketch pad.
But at the same time, PHP was instrumental to my learning how the web worked, in part because of how easy it was to find shared hosting that easily mapped PHP files to web routes 1:1. I can’t imagine I would have learned much if my first step was installing Apache, then mod PHP, then mod rewrite, then setting up htaccess files and directory permissions and then realizing that I didn’t get the PHP with GD graphics installed.
Maybe this is an “everyone learns differently” thing, or maybe this is a “the right answer is somewhere in the middle” thing.
The gap that needs to be minimized, I believe, is the gap between deciding to start and being able to produce actual usable stuff.
So, for example, the use of shared hosting that mapped PHP to web routes meant that you could get started and immediately create actual websites on the internet. Having to do that manually via setting up Apache, etc., makes that gap significantly larger.
OTOH, an online REPL lets you see the results of your code, but doesn’t actually let you create actual programs that you could use. Whereas setting up a local environment means that you can immediately create Python scripts that you can actually use.
An online REPL, in this way, only adds to the gap between someone deciding to start and creating real usable outputs.