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Comment by kelvinjps10 | Hacker News Reader

I remember learning to code with replit, the people from the course recommended replit because there was no setup to do

I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.

Seems to have worked out for them, mind!

Such a shame, it was really good for that

Some criticize that approach, suggesting that you're not learning important skills, but I applaud that approach. Anyone who's ever been in a workshop at a conference, where you have limited time to learn a topic, knows how much time is wasted doing initial setup.

yes this is such a good point, the OG replit could've been the perfect conferencing / classroom tool

Running an IDE in a browser like that is not something I'd ever want to work with long time or experimenting on my "own" computer - maybe it's just me being weird but running the code on the metal I'm holding is much more satisfying.

I'm not sure what features / tools replit had in this regard, but I could easily see it dominating CS education and conferences as the go-to IDE. (then making the real money by monetising the students in the future, i.e. other tools you can sell - even something like replit as a cloud provider), by having features like

  - templates you could share (i.e. one per lesson)
  - live sessions (where the professor could log into many students replit instance and demonstrate)
  - videos built into the editor / streaming / conferencing
  - "homework had-in" features, automated test sharing, etc.

I remember that was like workshop, something like learn to code in 20 minutes, and after learning the concepts and realizing you can control all those devices that power the world, just with code was magical.

I think that it had a big potential for that.

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