The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad, the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the stories of how he taught himself to use a computer by secretly observing his father, his early experiments with Emscripten building VMs for the web, the founding of Replit, and how their community has exploded in popularity in recent years. Some of the conceptual discussions touch on Scheme, potential futures of visual programming, Sketchpad, and GRAIL.

The transcript for this episode was sponsored, as ever, by Replit.

The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/052