I fail to see how it's advantageous over just having a shell account somewhere free like SDF though. Do young developers just want to interact with everything through the browser?
Failing to understand that different people have different preferences isn't a terribly interesting stance to take in public. These sort of sentiments are better worded as a search for knowledge, instead of this sneer.
You are the one sneering. "Failing to understand" is a completely respectful stance. It places the lack of understanding on the person saying it. It leaves open the possibility that the person saying it is wrong. It's skeptical but not without a degree of humility.
This is opposed to a straight up judgement, like what you have just done.
A browser is much easier to use. Every computer has a browser and no place blocks said browser. This means that when you're not near your dev machine, you can easily use another machine to log on, regardless of what software it has and which ports are open. As a bonus, you get a fullblown IDE with all your serverside dev tools (Node or Rails etc) ready to go, without any configuration or installation of packages.
For a concrete use case: my dev laptop broke down in the midst of a project, and I could just use a generalpurpose computer at location, use c9 to spin up a server, clone the git repo and I had an IDE to go with. Did not need to wait for the sysadmin to let me access a terminal or to unblock certain ports. No loss of productivity whatsoever, I was up and running in minutes.
Also, I can give others access to said c9 workspace, and they don't need to know anything besides the programming language used, to make little tweaks.
> A browser is much easier to use. Every computer has a browser and no place blocks said browser.
I think I just realized how much lasting trauma the browser wars caused me. You're completely right, but my gut still reflexively respond: I know you have a shiny thing that works great in Internet Explorer, but those ActiveX controls won't run in Opera on Linux...
Rebuilding trust in the web as an application platform is going to take some force on will on my part...
(That said, I have grumpy reservations on the security of our current and future web - but I guess it's not really worse than what it was like when people were running Windows 3.11 and running random code in spreadsheets on a samba-share...)
I used to volunteer teaching coding to youths (teens in highschool, mostly) and I tend to believe this is the case. Though I think it's driven by the fact that it's user-friendly to set-up & use vs. alternatives.
Consider the fact that it's super easy to buy a bunch of cheaper Chromebooks or tablets, fire up Nitrous or Cloud9, and now the focus can be on solving problems - rather than set-up/deployment.
> I used to volunteer teaching coding to youths (teens in highschool, mostly)
Well, I just tried to sign up to c9 to give it a try, and it asked for credit card information (it is mandatory, even for trying it out). I'm not sure if all the youth has access to a credit card. Also, I don't think it is very user-friendly, but that is beside the point.
That's new and perhaps a bit orthogonal to the argument here. Perhaps it rules out C9 as an option now, but the point remains that development on C9 was much simpler than all that setup stuff you have to do for a VM.
Somehow we are evolving beyond the PC era by going all the way back before the PC era. The only difference: tty replaced by browsers.
I get it that we need a better user interface than the plain text, but I fail to see any advantage of browsers either. Perhaps we really just need a better terminal emulator? I see the enlightenment guys has some new ideas[0]. Does anybody here know of anything else?
Everywhere that provides internet access will give you a browser, where they may not give you a proper SSH program (or worse, they'll block everything but 80/443 outbound). This happens with a lot of cyber cafes, free wifi hotspots, and so on.
> (or worse, they'll block everything but 80/443 outbound)
Or worse, they'll do deep packet inspection to make sure you are not using SSH. My high school did this, and I ended up stuck with Cloud9 instead of using my real server at home. Glad to be out of there.
I think younger developers have zero tolerance for lengthy configuration steps. Whether it's a build system that uses XML and is hard to grok or provisioning cloud services with the terminal, it's seen as a waste of time and ripe for optimization.
