This was one of the great things about the ol’ Commodore 64, decades ago: straight from the factory, power on, and a second later, you were in a fully set up BASIC developer environment/REPL. How did things get so complicated?
>Cloud-computing is one of the most significant paradigm shifts in our industry, yet it remains commandable only by relatively few professionals. It's similar to when, prior to microcomputers, only big corporations and universities had mainframes. We want Repl.it to be the microcomputer to the cloud's mainframe.
It’s still pretty easy to run default Python prompt in MacOS (as long as you know what the terminal is). But it gets complex really fast the moment you want to use a cool library. Which is probably a few minutes into your coding tutorial.
With Repl.it we're working on what we're calling a "universal package manager", a common abstraction on top of the various language package managers. It also has a visual interface which generates a requirements.txt/package.json/etc for you.