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Replit is one of those dystopian things that I hope fails.

Let’s move programming entirely into an environment where you don’t own your data, can’t duplicate or fully understand the runtime, are subject to total surveillance and the harvesting of your data for AI training and other monetization, and must pay rent forever with the constant threat of a rug pull. Great idea.

The thing I find most dystopian about it is that it’s aimed at beginners in a lot of ways. So you could have a generation raised up that doesn’t understand the idea of general purpose compute under their own control at all. Basically it’s the last nail in the coffin of personal computing.

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As someone who is mentoring a budding software engineer, let me offer you a different perspective.

I have a friend who got a fine arts degree in college and has spent the last several years working crappy odd jobs to make ends meet, and finally came to me earlier this year and said she wants to learn to be a web developer. I got her set up learning JavaScript in all of 10 minutes using Replit, and frankly it was exactly what I would hope for pedagogically. It's free for our purposes, dirt simple to set up, and has enough features to be helpful without being overwhelming.

We've gotten to a point now where we're introducing HTML and CSS and building real websites (after about 3 months of JS intensive) and I decided this was the right time to introduce coding locally rather than in Replit. She's a computer savvy person and was able to stumble her way through it in a couple of hours (she didn't want my help as this is how she learns stuff) but I can tell that the need to manage a locally running environment slows her down. This is a good thing in the long run of course, and I think pedagogically there's analogues to this in many disciplines (in learning piano, for example, moving from simple drills and method books for learners to "real" music feels as significant a leap), but the step function in complexity to do simple tasks is certainly there. It's important to jump that hurdle, but forcing it too early can discourage early learning and cause you to focus on the wrong things.

I had her shadow me working on a side project early on in her studies so she could see what the whole process looks like, and the sheer number of tools I was jumping between to do my work (AWS, Vim, the terminal, database query console, developer tools) was overwhelming. Replit allows you to focus on only the most important parts of the theory of programming, which is absolutely essential when starting out if you aren't immediately predisposed to doing complicated stuff on your computer. I think it adds a lot of value, so long as it's used responsibly in the context of a larger curriculum.

A bit of a random question and a bit off topic but would she offer you the same amount of attention and help if it was the other way around and you wanted to learn how to code?

I feel like this is a veiled attempt to be extremely, grossly sexist, but at the risk of taking the bait, yes I'm absolutely sure she would.

At my old university one of the intro classes moved all their students to Replit. Which might have been fine in isolation, but I think it created a year of students who struggled endlessly to use gcc, Makefiles, debuggers, or local tooling in general. Starting your CS journey with the local command line seems to put you into the perfect headspace right off the bat, even if it is a little slower to get going.

IMHO, the ugliest part of local environments is the OS, and fighting with interactions.

But VMs can abstract away most of this, especially in a learning environment where performance isn't a primary goal.

Then you can have a known-good set of instructions that doesn't have to include messing with whatever Apple/Microsoft/Ubuntu changed recently.

Docker was getting us pretty close to this until the M1 Macs came out and our Intel CPU presumptions blew up.

Docker has plenty of ARM images and I think they also have built in Rosetta support now to run x64 albeit with lower performance.

Well, those OS differences taught us to write (or strive to) portable code. It also taught me to better appreciate strengths in different operating systems over the years.

Absolutely! But in a learning format, the student probably needs to be focusing on the task at hand.

Learning to paper over OS errata isn't as generally useful as, say, groking multithreaded coding models.

Yes, there are environment quirks. Yes, you'll have to deal with them. Yes, you can look up documentation when you run into those situations.

Reflecting a little bit more I don't think it was replit's fault, per-say. But that change should have been made together with a larger adjustment to the program. Like adding a class/unit in the style of [the missing semester](https://missing.csail.mit.edu/) to make sure people came away with a good range of intuitions.

For the future the term you probably intended to use was "per se" - a Latin phrase meaning "by itself" or "in itself".

There's a lot of magic behind being able to write basic code and see the output on the screen.

I hate setting up environments, even with a folder of templates I've assembled over the years. The most frustrating barrier to get to the "magic" of seeing something happen is figuring out the proper/correct way to structure a project.

Towards the end of intro courses seems like an appropriate time to start bringing up tooling.

sounds great from Replit's point of view

they donate a couple of thousand dollars and in return get a CS class that will go out into the world completely dependent on them

Stack distaste of a commercially successful provider, from a freedom perspective, should be used for reflection.

Why are beginners using it?

Why are people using it?

And how could we solve those problems or recreate that experience in a more free form?

1) Replit is far from commercially successful relative to capital raised

2) The market demand for dramatically more accessible software development tools (more economical product development) is essentially unbounded

3) Replit has produced a marginal change in the frontier of accessibility, at unknown unit economics

4) What would a discontinuous change (step change) in accessibility look like?

Side note, ZIRP and AI have really muddied the waters here. ZIRP means we still don't know yet which companies are zombies. The AI claim is that product development will soon be decoupled from the economics of human coding. Neither of these issues are likely to be conclusively resolved for another few years (we can all place our own bets). Replit is deeply rooted in both.

ZIRP is in the past. We've seen a lot of outfall from this already.

we've hardly seen anything yet, ZIRP has second and third order effects which will take years, a decade, to shake out. Early stage startups are only just beginning to run out of cash (after layoffs and tightening last year), the Great Flushing hasn't even started! And that's just early stage, anyone who raised from a superfund 2 years ago still has 4-5 years runway in the bank after the 50% layoffs this year. These entrepreneurs, and their backers, may not even have realized yet that they themselves, their having been selected, their very existence are in fact ZIRP artifacts. They still think their valuation is real, and that they earned it!

Agreed. First was "Will your company fold in the next 6 months, now that you no longer have free money?"

Now it's likely more "What is your growth efficiency (dollar:growth) in a capital-constrained environment?"

And we're going to see more and more capital sucked back into debt service, as financing comes due and is reestablished. Which will snowball the terms for any companies which require capital infusion ASAP.

It'll be curious if the Berkshire Hathaway model of coupling low-growth, good cash-flow businesses to high-growth, bad cash-flow engines becomes dominantly competitive again.

That’s exactly the point of Replit. It removes a lot of the barriers that are keeping people from using programming in their daily lives.

The goal of personal computing was to make computers, with all their power, available to everyone. In that Replit is much more of a continuation of that work than its antagonist.

Once all computing is in the cloud there are going to be a lot of new barriers.

I could see everything you do being monitored for the implementation of unauthorized types of software for example, not to mention total surveillance and appropriation of everything you do.

“We’re sorry but it appears that the software you are implementing might be able to be used to facilitate communication without the required safeguards. Your project has been locked.”

Meanwhile if the center of gravity goes entirely to managed cloud services the endpoint will wither even more. I can see a future where you can’t even buy a general purpose computer except in the most raw form like SBCs or parts and doing so might even get you on a list.

Look at the EU chat control stuff or the crazies who want to ban matrix math. This is not that far fetched.

VSCode has these same threats, but is just a little more subtle/slow-moving about it.

Curious what you think of https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium .

I'm not actually familiar with the issues that VSCode has but I seem to recall some key component was not OSS, but I forget the details there and maybe it has changed. I know it has telemetry and such, but AFAICT that can be disabled by some settings. (I personally use vscode for my own work and disable telemetry and don't use any code assistant platforms, and I would like to know if there is a problem with what I'm doing)

I think parent refers to Codespaces and vscode.dev, not VSCode proper. These can indeed become gradually more locked down since they are completely online and out of the user's control, and as the UX difference between offline and cloud shrinks, people (especially new generations of developers) will slowly migrate there because of the convenience of not maintaining a toolchain themselves.

IOW, frog being boiled slowly.

thanks, I think that would make sense

Yes, this, but add Copilot and other such frog boil extensions into the mix, as well as the slow encroachment into the built-in terminal; all tooling that is slowly both making certain things easier while making understanding what's going on harder.

VSCodium is VSCode without the extensions ecosystem that people love.

hmm, interesting. I wonder if I can install a few extensions manually or something. ideally I would vet the code first...

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