amasad

That's interesting -- thanks for sharing! I try to be as erudite in computer history as possible but I still somehow missed this.

I pay homage to the Lisp community w/r/t programming interfaces in this post: https://amasad.me/disintegrated

This account made me realize how much of tweeting is bragging. I don't think people are like that in real life conversation but on Twitter we're all trying to sell something, be it ourselves, our products, or, in this case, our money.

This is such a cool educational tool! I got it to run on repl.it https://repl.it/@amasad/selfie

Awesome! Is this used anywhere in production?

We started as just an editor and a console -- I initially modeled it after the Dr Scheme REPL (now Racket) -- but our users wanted more. Kids who learned to code using our repl wanted to use it to build and publish apps so we evolved the product towards becoming more of an IDE while trying to keep the simplicity.

Check out our community as well, lots of hackers, especially young ones, sharing and collaborating on code: https://repl.it/talk

Focused on simplicity, speed, and generality. They do really well on frontend and client-side execution. Our speciality, on the other hand, is language support and containers/general dev environments.

Great to hear :-)

Certainly the plan. Just a matter of priorities and time. I'm curious, what's so attractive about self hosted version?

Much of the component pieces are open-source, as I mention in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22278301

And the goal is to get to open-source most, if not all of it.

Is GitPod fully open-source? AFAICT you still need to buy a license to self-host.

Thanks so much for the mention. It's indeed a lot of work, but we've done so much with such a small team and it's only accelerating as we layer all of our solutions on top of each other. We're solving one problem at a time with focus on patterns and abstractions that makes it easily extensible and could support virtually any language.

With the Universal Package Manager (https://github.com/replit/upm) we're trying to encode the best practices in package management behind a single easy-to-use interface. One of the most fun features is that you can `import` or `require` a package and we'll just guess what you want to do, install the dependencies for you, generate a spec and lock file.

With prybar (https://github.com/replit/prybar) we're trying to create a universal interactive programming experience that behaves roughly the same for every language.

And, to be open-sourced soon, our window-tiling manager and workspace (https://repl.it/blog/ide), we're trying to build a framework that makes it so easy to build complex, plugin-based environments, such as IDEs, very easy to build.

We also leverage a lot of awesome open-source projects and standards, like the Language Server Protocol by VSCode/Microsoft, that abstract over language features and makes it easy to provide an amazing experience across languages.

Edit: if it's been a few months since you tried Repl.it, give it another try, we've made a lot of progress since then. Multiplayer is now out of beta, we have Git integration, and we've done a lot to make it faster and more reliable.

We've made something similar at Repl.it -- we call it "Repl from Repo". It's far from running everything but it can run a lot: https://repl.it/blog/github

We tried to make it as seamless and as low configuration as possible. Our "run on repl.it" badge is currently growing exponentially on GitHub.

This is my calling. I'm the cofounder of Repl.it and I've dedicated my career to solving this problem.

Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif

Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused speed of setting up and taking the drudgery out of cross-platform mobile dev. And before that I was a founding engineer at Codecademy where we were attacking the same problem from an education angle.

With Repl.it, however, we're determined to simultaneously solve the "getting started" problem while scaling the environment to allow real work. It's incredibly challenging but we've made great progress. If anyone is interested in working with us, collaborating, or if you're simply passionate about this problem and want to chat then I'd love to hear from you: amjad@repl.it

I really like the essay but I think there is a form of Stockholm syndrome playing out especially with the following statements:

> using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were > If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

I think programmers think that the suckiness of their tools is a fact of the universe, when it's just that they don't know there's a better way.

At Repl.it, we built `upm` (Universal Package Manager) to make using packages a breeze with no fiddling. Ever since I started doing most of my scripting on Repl.it I almost never "fiddle" to get a package or a feature of the language to work.

upm goes as far as to guess your dependencies when you import them and will install and generate the spec and lock files. It's a truly magical experience. More here: https://repl.it/site/blog/upm

And we try to do a similar thing with every potential programming workflow. Can you make it "just work"? I think we can, for most things.

I've realized that fanboys are the same as haters with a "bit flipped" when we've had a super fan flip flop to and from being hater. And in each case he was writing articles and tweets about our startup saying why it's the best or why it's the worst.

It was quite disturbing and confusing to watch this happen. Since then I've starting engaging fanboys with caution, the same way I might engage haters. I take their opinions with a large grain of salt and try not give them a reason to get too obsessed.

This is amusing but doesn't really prove anything special about GPT-2 or general intelligence. You can probably get similar results with an n-gram model.

Try listening on 0.0.0.0 which will listen on all IPs on the machine and is required for running on remote environments like repl.it. When you do that we automatically detect the port open and show you a web view.

Give it a try for a "real" project and see how you feel about it. We've improved a lot recently. I'd love to hear your feedback when you try it out: amjad@repl.it

I looked up the PR author and it's a repl.it user and community moderator (https://repl.it/@eankeen).

Anyways, I hope the PRs are not annoying -- it certainly cool to be able to run under game quickly (I scored 97 https://imgur.com/a/HHMMXAY)

We're certainly not operating any bots if that's what you're implying.

Not yet. But planned

Thank you! ^^

According to "disruption" theory we're on our way :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

No, not at all. Our infra costs are a lot less than most people expect.

Thanks -- we'll take a look!

For engineers it may look simple but for someone new to programming -- and we've done the research -- the more elements in the app the more easy it is to get overwhelmed (cognitive load).

Repl.it, with all the features we added, still loads with an editor and a console and a huge green run button. Most users, even those very new to programming, intuitively get it.

>the code is not really under the control of Microsoft in the sense the is open source and in the worse case scenario you create a fork from the latest build, which is already pretty stable.

I'd like to see a 10 person startup maintain a monster codebase fork like that. I agree it's a nice insurance policy, but it just not realistic.

Anyways, your original feedback is well taken and we'll make sure to create some compat layer :-)

We decided against using vscode verbatim for a few reasons, chief among them is keeping repl.it simple for people starting to code.

And as much as I like vscode and the team behind it, it doesn't seem smart to tie your core tech to a project under the control of MSFT.

With regards to extensions you can easily imagine a vscode-replit bridge.

Finally, we came up with a novel approach to IDE/window management that we think people will be excited to write extensions for when we open it up: https://repl.it/blog/ide

Are you behind a firewall? Some block websockets. It also could be an aggressive adblocker.

Gitpod is awesome and a really bright team behind it.

However, Repl.it is different in that we're focused on speed and minimal configuration. You don't even need to login to clone a repo and start it.

The URL structure is repl.it/github/<GitHub path>

Try this 2048 implementation in C: https://repl.it/github/mevdschee/2048.c

(You can even run it on your phone!)

Chromebooks are one of the primary devices we test on (https://m.imgur.com/a/3eCnqUE)!

That's a good point tho, will discuss with the team.

I fixed it here: https://repl.it/@amasad/easydbio-python-example

Super awesome project and it could be great for our users as well. I just posted to our community https://repl.it/talk/announcements/EasyDBio-one-click-databa...

Sure it well. We have a lot of copycats as well. But as Elon Musk likes to say: the only moat that matters is the continuous pace of innovation and the value of open-source outwieghs any contrived barrier to entry.

Hey Salam, thanks for your PRs, definitely appreciated. I'll figure out what's the hold up -- I'm sure there is a reason -- and I'll make sure to get back to you