How did Replit respond to this blog post?

Yeah, seen this before: people apologising not because they suddenly care about what they did to their victims, but because they care about what the world thinks about them.

Edit: not responding to guilt but to shame.

Not a real apology when it only happens because of public pressure, this is just saving face. And not a very good attempt at that.

"I give you permission to publish Riju".

Emm. Really? Since when does he hold such a power?

I understand the feeling of being taken advantage of, but this seemed clearly like an over-reaction. A 100% apology was in order from my (sideline) opinion. He's just an ex intern having some fun, probably trying to impress his former boss even.

I was reading through the replit blog to see what kind of things are trade secret vs public, and noticed that they didn't go out of their way to highlight that Bret Victor's "Learnable Programming" is clearly the complete inspiration for replit's debugger (time travel, no hidden state, etc). They have a small link to Bret's work but don't mention him by name. Considering Bret's article is basically THE piece to read w.r.t. programming environments, and the gif that replit shows looks pretty identical, it seems right to have his name/article clearly at the top.

https://blog.replit.com/debuggest

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Honestly, this is about what I expected. I have the admittedly niche and somewhat impractical opinion that it's within no one's rights to have ownership over an idea, an implementation, or a solution to any problem at all. When businesses try to base themselves off of that type of ownership, of course they'll be threatened by someone putting together a small side project for the fun of it. Ideas aren't something you can totally own: someone else will come up with them simultaneously, make a derivative work, or just have fun with it in a way you can't physically stop. I think I'm seeing that play out as a business in a bad position and a person trying their best here. I mostly just feel bad for the OP and a bit irritated at capitalism, as always.