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

repl.it

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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway872 wrote: post #86
amasad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those companies charged for their product and had enterprise plans ;)

Sure, but no one used them -- just like Repl.it, pretty much all of their monthly active users were only there for the free plan, and they left as soon as the companies tried to monetize. Koding, in particular, went through pretty much exactly the same cycle as Repl.it a few years ago. They started out getting tons of users by giving cloud servers away for free, targeted mainly at children/education market. Then they…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by jakebasile »

icelancer wrote: post #71
jakebasile wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It takes literally 10 seconds to run `ls -la` and `cat` some files to get the information. If that's a problem for an applicant, it's a good exclusion to the funnel.

Like sibling says, on mobile it's a pain. In general, when I look at a job posting, I just want to skim it. I don't want to interact with the webpage in any other way than "reading".

I get it, this is clever. It supposedly weeds out poor applicants. But speaking for myself it just strikes me as annoying.

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

#103

Post by Alex3917 »

sixhobbits wrote: post #77

Python, the "second best language for everything", has had a huge impact for teaching people programming. Beginners can do useful and interesting things and solve real problems after a few hours of learning. And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv installed and can't run a basic script after 4 hours o…

> And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv installed and can't run a basic script after 4 hours of trying because environment mess-up is ridiculous.

Definitely true. Getting Python to run correctly is not only one of the hardest parts of learning to code, but comes right at the beginning so before people have experienced any success. It's gotten less bad in the last year or so thanks to pipenv, but it's still not a great situation.

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

#104

Post by cercatrova »

bharris62 wrote: post #7
cercatrova wrote: post #3

I'm disappointed that now you need to sign up on www.repl.it rather than just spinning up a test environment, definitely cuts down on usage. I've found a workaround with www. http://repl.it/languages/python3 for example, but I'm not sure how long this will still be active given their plans to become a full-fledged IDE.

I think it has always been like that, if you scroll to the bottom you can click on what environment you want to load. Been like that awhile I think.

Before you got the drop down on the front page that you now see on repl.it/languages. I admit I didn't look too hard at the list of languages that are there now, but just that one change to sign up instead of dive into the repl was a little annoying.

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

#105

Post by amasad »

solarkraft wrote: post #93
amasad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have no plans and I see no reason to make you have to sign up. (Although to cut down on abuse some things aren't available for anonymous users like long-term web hosting). You can also go to repl.it/languages and see all the langauges. As for our plans to become an IDE: we've given ourselves the hard task of being a REPL-first IDE and to always load in under 2 seconds. More here: https://repl.it/blog/platform For…

> we've found that most people coming through there go through the signup/login flow anyways This baffles me. Why? Don't people just want to mash something into a REPL quickly (step in between: write the first one or two letters of the language you want to use and press enter)? That's certainly how I use it ...

Oh most people will google "repl.it ruby" and get to that directly.

We also just discussed this and we're adding a language selector on the homepage.

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

#106

Post by amasad »

sirodoht wrote: post #88
emiliobumachar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here is a (recent) very interesting interview with PG, among others, talking about Viaweb. Bonus points: very funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WO5kJChg3w

I believe the example he gave about "doing a naughty thing" was referencing our idea of terminal-apps-as-webpages: https://repl.it/jobs for an example

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

#109

Post by nodesocket »

throwaway872 wrote: post #86
amasad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those companies charged for their product and had enterprise plans ;)

Sure, but no one used them -- just like Repl.it, pretty much all of their monthly active users were only there for the free plan, and they left as soon as the companies tried to monetize. Koding, in particular, went through pretty much exactly the same cycle as Repl.it a few years ago. They started out getting tons of users by giving cloud servers away for free, targeted mainly at children/education market. Then they…

while I agree with your analysis, why the throwaway accounts? It seems a bit suspicious.

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

#110

Post by ryandrake »

sixhobbits wrote: post #77

Python, the "second best language for everything", has had a huge impact for teaching people programming. Beginners can do useful and interesting things and solve real problems after a few hours of learning. And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv installed and can't run a basic script after 4 hours o…

This was one of the great things about the ol’ Commodore 64, decades ago: straight from the factory, power on, and a second later, you were in a fully set up BASIC developer environment/REPL. How did things get so complicated?
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