We think repl.it is the C64 of the cloud era:

>Cloud-computing is one of the most significant paradigm shifts in our industry, yet it remains commandable only by relatively few professionals. It's similar to when, prior to microcomputers, only big corporations and universities had mainframes. We want Repl.it to be the microcomputer to the cloud's mainframe.

I like the goal but find it weird that getting back to the great usability of a system over 30 years old now requires a cloud service and round trips to a server. Why can’t I buy a boot ROM for a PC that drops me to a python prompt after a sub-1-second boot up?

I mean, you can. The reason things are hard is because of external libraries (dependencies) that you might dynamically download and start using. If you don't have that restriction, things get vastly simpler.

That should exist too. Right now doing it in the cloud allows instant sharing and hosting but I hope we can get to a point where we can build something like what you suggest.

Dependency management is the big one, I think.

It’s still pretty easy to run default Python prompt in MacOS (as long as you know what the terminal is). But it gets complex really fast the moment you want to use a cool library. Which is probably a few minutes into your coding tutorial.

Agreed. It's also a tough problem. Before starting Repl.it, I worked on a JavaScript packager at Facebook (which became the Metro Packager).

With Repl.it we're working on what we're calling a "universal package manager", a common abstraction on top of the various language package managers. It also has a visual interface which generates a requirements.txt/package.json/etc for you.

https://repl.it/site/blog/packager

How is this so difficult? I haven't done much since the 2.X days, and I was on Windows, but I used to grab the PyGame installer and have sprites drawing on screen in 15 minutes 15 years ago.