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Discussion on: Why online coding is the future ✅

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau • Edited

This sort of thing has been around for a very long time and never really picked up momentum. The main issue in my experience is the quality level of the web IDE is much lower than what is available on the desktop (autocompletion, debugging, plugin ecosystem, etc). You loose out on some productivity when moving to a web IDE (inferior tools), and in my experience, due to the gain in productivity being too small (not having to set things up locally), results in a overall loss in productivity.

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Elias Groll

At Google, we had a very integrated and well working environment in the browser (lets not call Codesphere an IDE, its actually a Cloud Provider where the UI is an IDE) called CIDER.

It was very productive for tools like blaze/bazel and boq (the internal "kubernetes").

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aghost7 profile image
Jonathan Boudreau

You are missing my point. In your example, you mention bazel, but I've never seen any Java projects using it in the wild. This is very specific to Google and probably won't be selected by most companies. Maintaining an ecosystem that supports a wide variety of workflows is very hard, even more so in the cloud. This is why I am very sceptical that coding online is the future.

Another thing I've found annoying with web-based IDE's is that hotkeys of the browser itself can conflict with your terminal ones (ie, readline defaults). This is a fairly minor issue though.

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eliasgroll profile image
Elias Groll

I am not saying Google's tech was best for most companies, but it was very productive for one workflow.

We aim to do this for fullstack apps written in TypeScript.

Fully agree with the hotkeys, its annoying but yeah..minor.

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Roman Frolov • Edited

I absolutely agree.

And that's why we're here to change it. :)

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Christian Siemoneit

You are exactly right. All those mentioned features (autocompletion, etc.) must be a part of a web IDE to really boost productivity.