While I take pride in being nerdy, I’d argue that playing Dungeons & Dragons is not a nerdy game. Its stereotype totally misses the mark. For those that don’t know, D&D is a tabletop game in which a group of people come together and role-play as characters within a wider story led by the game master.

Okay, maybe that description doesn’t help my case – let me try again:

It’s an interactive movie marathon with friends. It’s about uninhibited imagination and making memories. In other words, it is undiscriminatingly human. And that’s why it’s still massively popular today, despite the supersensorium of on-demand entertainment.

I’ll admit, if that pitch compels you to give it a go, I might be in a bit of trouble. Because if you’d ask me where to start, I’d reply by presenting a 320-page handbook full of rules, spells and classes to study before you could get properly involved. You’d likely give me a look and we’d drop the idea immediately.

When it becomes more about character stats or dice-rolling and less about the adventure, D&D loses its magic. Thankfully, there is a workaround. Instead, I could give you a ten-minute condensed brief, we could join a table with an ongoing story, and you could learn the rules on the fly. After all, the rules are just a means to a more important end.

Anyways, this was not supposed to be a love-letter to D&D. I bring it up because I believe it serves as a powerful analogy for what the team at Replit is trying to achieve.

As it stands today, Replit is an online interactive programming environment, the name itself referring to the ‘REPL’ or read-eval-print loop cycle. The idea is to have a real environment that is easily accessible, in which users can contribute to various open-source projects, and be able to monetise their own. Convenient, enjoyable, rewarding – and multiplayer (think Google Docs for coders).

Note: they aren’t trying to replace existing tools or to present an alternative to experienced devs. There are performance issues, and a browser-based experience will inevitably fail to offer the range of other IDEs.

But the point, going back to the D&D analogy, isn’t to write another rulebook. Replit’s doing the introduction the right way. It gives the aspiring developer a seat at the table of an ongoing adventure.

The long-term vision is for the next generation of aspiring builders to write their first line of code in Replit. A platform for the next billion coders to learn the fundamentals as part of a wider community and develop their skills with peers. The crux of the design philosophy is that collaboration and open-source is the natural path forwards. The interface will continue to appeal to a younger audience who don’t have years of existing IDE/framework knowledge. And if all of this is the case, the platform will likely benefit from positive network effects as it grows up alongside its userbase.

Or as put by Packy McCormick: ‘It’s disruptive innovation meets the compounding power of young users.’

Don’t get me wrong, rulebooks can be cool. Writing compilers is good fun. Millions across the globe enjoy learning syntax, experimenting with novel frameworks and comparing their idiosyncrasies – just in the way that some D&D players might enjoy flicking through a spell book as if it were a shopping catalogue.

But—there’s so, so much more to it than that.

Many of us desperately want to tell stories and build cool things with others. Platforms that make this easier for us – that let us cut to the chase – they’re the platforms we should bet on and help succeed. As co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad writes:

Repl.it is a reaction to the modern software development grind, where many developers spend their time waiting for builds, running tests, fighting with linters, and configuring frameworks. It's an attempt to get back to the basics of programming -- to make coding fun again.