Why did you raise money? How will you make money? Is there a similar service that’s not involved with VC?
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Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
151–160 of 231 posts
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#152Python, 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…
I think there is a lot of value in going through the pains of setting up a development environment, writing build scripts, debugging environment issues, etc.
> Beginners can do useful and interesting things and solve real problems after a few hours of learning.
What real problems are beginners actually solving? I literally cannot think of a single one.
Most introductory programming tutorials I've seen start off with very straightforward instructions to setting up a basic environment - and this is actually useful in the long run. vs programming in some special editor abstracted away from the real world.
That being said online repls are useful for writing quick code for e.g. testing something out.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#153Python, 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…
I've been using Python as my go-to language for a while. It works well and I feel like I understand the basics, but pipenv, pyenv, pip etc. seem needlessly complex. Especially when I'm trying to create a serverless framework package, or upload a zip to AWS Lambda. Never know what tool to use to install packages, or how to specify the python version... or even change the python version on my Mac. Homebrew Python, syst…
I use pipenv for this. I found it sometimes annoying but generally sufficient. Pyenv and pip both seemed too weak or complex. Pipenv was just simple. I would only write code within my pipenv environment, and then when I deployed the code pipenv would handle package management safely.
Never did anything huge with it though. Just small web apps hosted on pythonanywhere.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Python as my go-to language for a while. It works well and I feel like I understand the basics, but pipenv, pyenv, pip etc. seem needlessly complex. Especially when I'm trying to create a serverless framework package, or upload a zip to AWS Lambda. Never know what tool to use to install packages, or how to specify the python version... or even change the python version on my Mac. Homebrew Python, syst…
This doesn't answer your questions, but I firmly believe this is the major reason node took off in popularity. Npm let you install packages minutes after being installed, and they went right into a folder right there, and they didn't conflict with any other packages on your system. I was like you and played with python for years but never anything larger than small scripts, and every time I went to do "real" python I…
I don't think many people here will agree with you but I do. I use Javascript for almost everything I do because "It just works." Assuming you are running Node 6.0+ and NPM 4+ you'll almost never run into an issue unless you are using something that needs some native packages installed.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#155Great news! It's an awesome product. Congrats Repl.it!
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#156Repl.it's current business model appears to be giving cloud services away for free, attracting lots of users, and using their high user counts to get more venture capital funding to spend on giving away cloud services for free. Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them clo…
I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing
Go find something better to do.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#157Earlier 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…
1. We've been arond longer than most in this space (since 2011)
2. We've been profitable and bootstrapping for a long time. We have paying users like Facebook, Google, and Stripe, Hackreactor, HCT (biggest college in the UAE) and so many more: https://repl.it/pricing
3. We're probably like 5-10x Koding users base.
4. You keep creating accounts to spread misinformation. Go find something better to do.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Python as my go-to language for a while. It works well and I feel like I understand the basics, but pipenv, pyenv, pip etc. seem needlessly complex. Especially when I'm trying to create a serverless framework package, or upload a zip to AWS Lambda. Never know what tool to use to install packages, or how to specify the python version... or even change the python version on my Mac. Homebrew Python, syst…
I use pipenv for this. I found it sometimes annoying but generally sufficient. Pyenv and pip both seemed too weak or complex. Pipenv was just simple. I would only write code within my pipenv environment, and then when I deployed the code pipenv would handle package management safely. Never did anything huge with it though. Just small web apps hosted on pythonanywhere.
Specifying dependencies when you're writing a library is still a mess, because pipenv isn't recommended for libraries. npm works the same way for both apps and libraries.
Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
#160Python, 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 peop…
> 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.
This is a surreal statement to read as someone who basically just writes and runs nearly pure Python in a text editor.