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Comment by samsartor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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".

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

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