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Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

repl.it

31–40 of 231 posts

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#32
post #6

This is awesome I hope they invest some of that into rebranding as I do believe Repl.it is probably the worst name for anything. It almost sounds like a nefarious file format or like some software company for the early 90s; maybe that’s the vibe they’re going for. Even the word Replit looks like “reptile”. I guess it’s very developer-y it’s just grammatically grating on the nerves.

[deleted]

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've been using this for a while, maybe you can educate me on the benefit of this over a shell or IDE on my local system? I don't quite get it.

We've occasionally used it when discussing Python X vs Python Y behaviours across separate machines (I don't have 3.6 installed but 3.7, a coworker has 3.6 but no 3.7) and are the kind of questions you just want to quickly check, not create a new virtual environment (under Homebrew on Mac, good luck having 3.6 _and_ 3.7 if you regularly `brew cleanup`...) or spin a docker instance. The coworker also regularly tries S…

pyenv is a good solution for managing multiple Python version installations.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#34
post #10

I am a long time user of repl.it and I think it's great but I do wonder what the expected ROI is here? Call me short sighted, but It's still just a repl. Perhaps it could be sold to GitHub to integrate with Gist?

Towards the end of the post there's a bit about our business.

As we've noticed that more people want to use repl.it for more things: from building websites and apps (250,000 in 6 months) to data science[0] and education, with a growing community of hackers[1] it's becoming a generic computing platform. The fact that the REPL is the main interface is besides the point. We're going to productize our infrastructure that runs all this.

After all, Microsoft started as a Basic interpreter for the Altair[2] ;)

[0]: https://towardsdatascience.com/build-deploy-data-science-pro...

[1]: https://repl.it/talk

[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#36
post #28

Funny to see PG listed as "Paul Graham, founder of Viaweb" and not "Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator" :-)

Tongue-in-cheek :-P but I do think that Viaweb is relevant here: their original business model (it was called Webgen) was to let people host their sites with them. They were also the first to figure out "cloud" where they ran their customers generated code on their infrastructure. I believe after building Viaweb, PG had a similar idea of an IDE + language + infrastructure to allow people to build and ship application…

So, they basically invented Software As A Service? Relevant indeed.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#38
post #14

the jobs link is interesting. Takes you to a functioning command line but has no other hints or instructions. An interesting gating function: those who don't know how to proceed further (or can't problem-solve sufficiently to find out) aren't likely to succeed in the role and can safely be excluded. Might also have the added bonus of being safe from headhunter bot scrapers.

xD

link: https://repl.it/site/jobs

it's built with repl.it too: https://repl.it/@util/jerbs

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#39
post #14

the jobs link is interesting. Takes you to a functioning command line but has no other hints or instructions. An interesting gating function: those who don't know how to proceed further (or can't problem-solve sufficiently to find out) aren't likely to succeed in the role and can safely be excluded. Might also have the added bonus of being safe from headhunter bot scrapers.

Interesting indeed. Definitely weeds out applicants who are not familiar with the command line.

It also weeds out people who don't have time for "cute" little games like that.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting indeed. Definitely weeds out applicants who are not familiar with the command line.

It also weeds out people who don't have time for "cute" little games like that.

Sounds like it might also be their way of weeding out people who aren't going to be a culture fit.
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