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

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 Scala stuff there (he's had to code review some simple things to start getting familiar with the language), he seems to like it more than the normal Scala repl (which I use).

It's also handy for funny little languages you may not have (the APL version it has is decent enough, for instance, although I prefer GNU, as the free one)

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

Yes, but this is better for quickly trying something.

Definitely agreed on that.

Thanks, I had assumed it would have issues with 3.6 binary not svailable. Will try sgain (although my plan is get everybody using 3.7...)

Also, on an ordinary local repl, I'm never going to have to suffer through watching ads... which is where I see this sort of thing headed.

I can quickly run some code on my daughter's Chrome book. I like having that option.

I use it whenever I don't have a local shell available.

For example, when using an iPhone or iPad, or if I need to test something real quick in language X and I don't have X installed on the machine.

they will evolve/pivot to a "big data notebook" and monetize on this.