Comment by stuaxo
5 years ago
The threats seem directly at odds with the CEOs tweet here https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754
This whole saga is pretty sad really.
While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
They should have just been happy with that.
It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
Really strange / insecure attitude.
The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.
That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!
Plenty of people are pleasant in public and shitty in private.
My guess would be more the available source rather than the website itself. I think it's fair to say somebody who interned at a place would have had things explained to them and had access to internal design docs which the intern themselves wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch.
I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.
Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The intern's clone, according to them, had nothing of this (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If they'd rebuilt all that too I'd see the point, but really, what great secrets are there in those "design docs" that just refer to the part of the service where you put in your code and click run? These things have been around for at least a decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.
If it is bizarre for an intern then how does it look when "employee #1 of Code Academy" starts Repl.it right after working on the same kind of thing there? This smells like someone who saw himself in the intern and disliked it.