This was a dream for coding bootcamps, classrooms, etc. Unfortunately I keep hearing from lots of places that you just can't make money in edu. But man, I love these tools for teaching people how to code. It's the only way to go.
I really disagree with that. If you're learning how to use it then you should also learn how to install it, and use it outside of the learning environment.
And by the time that you've installed it once, it won't be an issue again.
No. If you are going to develop professionally with a language then you should know how to install the environment. But that's a huge ask for people just learning.
I have fought through issues of setting up a development environment for modern web development for the last ten years in boot camps and classrooms. When everyone brings their own device, you run into tons of issues you can't control. Students get confused by differences in terminals, text editors, and many other factors. The instructor's environment must match what the students have. And these allow for that.
And if you think "well, if they can't bother to set up their own evironment, they shouldn't be writing code cos they're not smart enough," I'll offer this. While I agree that it's important to know your tools as a professional, we are not talking about professionals here. We are often not even talking about people who want to be professional software developers. There are many people who have studied their field for years and are probably much smarter than many of us here are now getting into code because it's a tool for them to do their work better. It is in my opinion arrogant to insist they set up their own tools before they can learn what we do.
I'm not saying we shouldn't teach people who aren't "smart enough". I'm not saying that there should be a rite of passage of "learn Emacs/VIM, learn bash, learn to hate bash, learn zsh/fish, ..." that everyone MUST go through in order to be considered worthy of learning anything. Nor should messing around with $PATH be a requirement to get started.
But I think that the tools used in the education should neatly transition into tools that they can use for personal stuff, both during their education, and after they finish it. And it definitely shouldn't be using any "Educational" editions that time-bomb as soon as you leave school.
Sadly, I'm not sure of anything that offers this in a turnkey package today. To me, the closest seems to be IntelliJ IDEA (community edition, of course) which apparently ships an embedded JDK these days, and the instructor can ship a Maven/Gradle project definition that handles the rest of the environment that should be available.
Depends. I spent some time teaching high school students. A large portion of them will not write any code after taking the class.
Teaching them how to install and configure an IDE is a pretty useless skill in that context.
Instead, even if they never code again, teaching them a little bit about how to think like a computer and some basic computer skills (many of them were almost computer illiterate) seemed like a much more valuable use of time.
I wish Codeanywhere and others the best of luck.