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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

This mostly seems to be about a new CEO at Fog Creek.

I have never heard of him but appearantly he has a big following. And it appears that a very large number of people don't like him - enough to create a bunch of new accounts here at HN just to comment on his persona.

Fog Creek has to me always been about Joel on Software. And to me they always got a lot of credit and extra attention to their products because of his excellent writing. It must be hard for a new CEO to follow up on that.

As for the product; it has already been announced and discussed here earlier.

Personally I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space of online, web-based, collaborative development environments. Honestly I think has too few features and is kinda ugly. But given that Trello and Stack Overflow has very large user bases maybe it is able to push thru and gain critical mass.

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We think it's a hugely underserved market. I've written a little about where we think Gomix fits relative to other similar products: https://medium.com/gomix/gomix-and-the-evolution-of-paas-362...

Thanks for the link.

The key paragraph for me was this one:

> The Gomix model is: just click. And in that respect, we have much in common with developer playgrounds like CodePen and JSFiddle. They too are fun for trying things out, and a nice way for developers to share ideas. But they don’t provide any ability to run back-end code, which greatly limits the types of things that you can build with them. What’s more, key features like realtime collaboration between multiple users are often limited to only paying users, putting up a barrier for educational use or simple pair-programming scenarios.

The HN discussion of the product - was it this one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426

Just thought the link might be useful for folk interested in reading more about that.

There was also a discussion when it was announced as Hyperdev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808911

>I fail to see what it adds to an already crowded space

Can you give an example? I'm not aware of many products that are attacking the problem of making coding easier and more fun in the same way they are.

Countless people have tried to make programming "easier" and "more fun". It usually ends up into wishful thinking and lots of sentences with "awesome" and other words without any meaning in them.

I'd rather make coding simpler than easier. The fun will naturally emerge out of using simpler constructs. This is exactly what Clojure did for me :)

I tried many tools with Java/C#/C++/JavaScript/Ruby and whatnot and while they can be useful, they're not to the point of making code actually easier or fun in these languages - at least not nearly enough for all the learning they require you to do.

Oh yes I'm aware many have tried and most have failed. But that's why I'm glad to see another go at it.

I'm convinced it's possible to strike a balance in designing such a product that catches on like wildfire.

I think what they have is a decent start but could be a lot better. Maybe I'll share some of my own ideas if they are open to that kind of feedback.

Absolutely, always eager to get feedback. Feel free to comment here or you can mail me: gwilson at fog creek dot com

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