
Ask HN: Alternatives to Cloud9 as a development environment for teaching coding? - villaumbrosia
For context, we&#x27;re teaching an 8-week introduction to programming course, and our students are business professionals who don&#x27;t have a technical background and don&#x27;t plan on becoming full-time programmers. The most important consideration for us is a user-friendly setup where the important components (terminal&#x2F;CLI, text editor, a 1-click button for starting up a server, etc.) are all in one place. This way students don&#x27;t have to spend time installing anything on their computers, and instructors don&#x27;t have to worry about students using Mac vs Windows.<p>Since Amazon recently fully integrated Cloud9 into their AWS service, the interface has become quite unfriendly for students just starting out. There no longer even seems to be an option to create a new workspace with a particular template. Considering that we&#x27;re teaching Ruby on Rails, the option of generating a barebones app with GUI interface was very appealing.<p>I&#x27;ve seen some alternatives out there but haven&#x27;t tried them yet:<p>- Koding
- Replit
- Plunker 
- Visual Studio Code with LiveShare<p>I&#x27;d love to know if there&#x27;s a good alternative that comes close to the old version of Cloud9?
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tchened
Hi! Tim from Repl.it here.

I used to be an avid c9 user in the classroom as well, but the startup time
was killing me.

When is your 8-week program starting? Repl.it can do almost everything you
want it to - our editors are fast to load, starting a server is as simple as
opening a port, and we're extremely easy to use and almost feature complete.
The only thing we're missing is a terminal, which is in the works (the alpha
version is released, but may not work for RoR). I just want to get a sense of
your timeframe so I can see if we can expedite this feature for you. Let me
know if you have any questions!

