Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a big fan of Fog Creek (having worked there for 7 years). But I'm a little stumped on who this is for.

Without any persistence (Mongo, SQL, Redis, something) this is nothing more than a toy. Right now, the forums suggest setting one up via some PAAS, which obviates the whole "it's only one step" thing. Presumably persistence is on its way, as this is just a beta.

Persistence aside, it's still lightweight for an experienced developer. All of the things listed in Joel's "look what you don't have to do list" exist because they are good practice. In fact, 16 years ago Joel wrote about the 12 things that you need to make good software[0], which, coincidentally, includes almost everything on that convenience list.

On the other hand, if you're just learning to code, not having to provision a server or deal with Git isn't really fixing the hard part. Heroku and GitHub are making that easier and easier. HyperDev drops you right into an active NodeJS project without explaining what package.json is, where you define your views, or even what views are.

This leaves it serving a very narrow demographic, which is often the problem with these sorts of tools. Hopefully Fog Creek will be able to make it more broadly appealing before the shine wears off.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

I think you’re underestimating the addressable market. StackOverflow has 45M unique users [1], and yet Evans Data [2] and others put the number of developers at around 20M. So there are tens of millions of people looking for help with programming issues who aren’t professionals. I think a lot of them, and professional developers with side-projects and quick scripts to write, will find utility here. The typical Git workflow best-practice is something of a one-size-fits-all at the moment, and we think it’s not a great fit in some circumstances. So this is just another option.

On persistence - each HyperDev project gets a DynamoDB. It’s definitely trickier to use than we’d like, so we’ll be getting to that, but for now here’s an example project you can remix that uses it - https://hyperdev.com/#!/project/typhoon-pine. Or there are other options like one that uses a free mlab MongoDB - https://hyperdev.com/#!/project/navy-flower that’s pretty easy to get going with.

But I think you should just try building something with it - here’s a good excuse: https://hyperdev.com/blog/developer-contest-get-back-nature/. From what I remember from Aavardk’d [3] you’re a keen photographer so it should be your thing!

1 - https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com 2 - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi... 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

I often go on jsfiddle to quickly do some stuff that may or may not be shown to other people. Hyperdev does that with a little twist that allow me to do even more quicker. It's not meant to make your next product, it's meant to quickly prototype something, probably for fun, possibly to do something bigger later, but certainly not to develop on some kind of commercial project.

My first thought was that I could finally teach my mum that code is not magic, and that is a very, very powerful concept.

It's all about diminishing the barrier to entry, and honestly I'm very impressed with this project. To me, this is a breakthrough. I think that combining this with a very minimalistic class could teach people that computers aren't magical, and anyone can try.

It looks to me like this is for getting started quickly at hackathons.

The power of a REPL should not be underestimated. This is like that for web development I guess.

the idea looks like: 'why not extend jsfiddle/splunker to a real running website ?'

Even without persistence it has its uses. I have a couple of proxy services on heroku that would fit, for example.

And I made a Skype bot. Persistence would improve some things about it but it works just fine without it.

What's wrong with toys? I think that's what this is supposed to be.

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