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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I'm bullish on this because mobile (and web) development is ridiculously overcomplicated to a beginner. I think it's a common misconception that coding/logic is difficult. I find the development setup and deployment to be much more complicated. As evidence, take a look at the impressive workarounds that citizen developers use to make things work in an easy environment like Excel.

A keyboard and mouse probably solve most of the complaints in this thread.

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I think the idea here is to enable people in places of the world that may not have laptops, where mobile phones are people's only computer. That's how I'm looking at this, but that's just my guess.

Think people with chromebooks or old laptops who cannot use it for development. Or restricted laptops loaned from school which do not allow anyone but admin access to install anything.

I agree. I think it's great. I was trying to point out that most(?) Android and iOS devices allow you to connect any cheap USB or Bluetooth keyboard.

My MacBook Pro died from humidity while I was trapped in the amazon rainforest during the panedemic, and I had to do some work, so I bought an USB keyboard in Iquitos and I set up a development environment with postgres, vim, tmux, ruby, rails etc, inside Termux. Small screen, and no devtools in mobile browsers, but worked pretty good otherwise.

I'm, generally, not bullish: But only because the predominating "what value do products like this bring" arguments from those who are bullish is some variation of "it's great for learning/beginners". That's simply no way to build a venture business (and replit has received... $105M).

Higher layers of abstraction can make sense; no code tools can be killer; but that isn't really replit. Replit is just a weird product on the side of the abstraction spectrum which requires its devs to understand a large chunk of what would be required to get, say, a nodejs server running on, say, Heroku.

Note Heroku isn't free anymore. I know you didn't say it was, but it's worth mentioning.

Understanding the moving parts well enough is one thing. Being responsible for writing and maintaining all the layers of configuration and glue it takes to properly operate web apps in the cloud is another. There's room for abstractions short of no-code that remove this burden, IMO, and not just for beginners or learning.

Replit isn't for building HA/mutli-tenant stateless, web applications with hot-hot failover, data redundancy, perfect docs and APIs

It's for people who want to learn how to code or want to prototype something absolutely as quickly as possible with the minimal amount of tooling and experience.

> It's for people who want to learn how to code or want to prototype something absolutely as quickly as possible with the minimal amount of tooling and experience

For sure. I'm just personally not sure that's a billion-dollar company idea myself, which if you've taken $100 million+ of funding, it will need to be. Definitely willing to eat my words though if they pull it off: anything that gets more people into programming and understanding how the devices they use work is a good thing in my opinion (which is worth about as much as you just paid for it!)

Funding goes to companies that will pass on a part or all of that funding on to partners. It is like a big wash that goes round and round until the right people get rich. And the reason for this is to make the world a better place

Just my take, but the more people who can “code”, even at a basic level, the better. Because then they intuit that the challenging part in not the words but the logic.

Learn to code then be an “excel jockey”. Those folks create just as much value with less of the identity bullshit.

Edit - sorry if this sounded confrontational. That wasn’t my intent - I just learned that I feel passionately about this topic.

Excel certainly has it's place and is great as an interchange format and prototyping platform for domain specialists. I agree that it's unjustly derided by snobbish programmers. Converting to and from CSV is cheaply implemented and can do wonder as human interface to a system since "non programmers" know how to deal with that.

The problems start when it is pushed beyond its limits, sheets can become undocumented mess of cell spaghetti which users still expect to scale up and grow new features indefinitely. It's hard to determine for Excel coders when they are past that cost/benefit tipover point and move up to a more robust set of programming tools.

> I find the development setup and deployment to be much more complicated

My understanding is that is the problem repl.it is trying to solve. In a sentence: think about your code and not your environment.

My curmudgeonly self thinks that there are deeper problems and externalities that programming on a phone/tablet or in the web only exasperate. Computer literacy is shockingly poor among the incoming generation of people who have only used mobile devices, WebUIs, and maybe a Chromebook - and that's not the fault of people or technology, but the business models that only succeed by locking users into platforms and hiding details of how those platforms work. The issue with programming on mobile or through something like repl.it is that it hides too much - at the end of the day, tinkering with computers requires computers that can be tinkered with and software systems that can be introspected.

> The issue with programming on mobile or through something like repl.it is that it hides too much

VT100 and IBM360, you didn't have to be in the mainframe room to learn to code.

I believe there are enormous amounts of resources which enable people to self-tech the basics of coding. I partially agree -- but it's not an absense of possibility, it's absense of motivation. I think it's exactly because modern systems are opaque to a beginner

I suppose I'm "bearish" on selling development as it presently exists for the exact same reason?

Right now, what's being sold is "more people can go into the career of programming" as opposed to "no really, it's possible to bring so-called 'programming' to everyone.'"

Put differently, it wasn't that Hypercard didn't catch on, it's that things like Hypercard get "killed."

This is it for me. My background is in design so I'm a novice when it comes to any development. But setting things up via command line confuses me to hell.

>I find the development setup and deployment to be much more complicated

Fully agree with this.

To the extent where I wish there was an "environment service" wherein I simply specify the desired packages and tools I want via GUI (No JSON or Terraform or anything other than radio buttons and drop downs) - and I get a spooled up VM with all the dependencies and paths perfectly built in with no jank package clashes or deprecated packages that need patching.

So a GUI for Nix?

I'm bullish on this because my children prefer phones and iPads for almost everything that I would prefer a computer for. They have ten times more experience with computing devices than I did when I was their age, and almost all of that experience is via touch screens. Keyboard and mouse are unnatural for them, but when it comes to navigating mobile UIs, they are perhaps already faster and more fluent than I am.

And how is repl.it different here compared to GitHub codespaces, codepens, codesandbox and many others?

Are any of those workable on a phone?

https://glitch.com works on phones, codesandbox doesn't iirc and I doubt github codespaces does either (they both use stuff from vscode), codepen does.

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