People forget the bit about poor performing machines. Developers with tech jobs often have high end machines provided to them. Many students do not, especially at public open-enrollment places. They come with whatever they have, despite recommendations from the program they enter.
This is also a reason that Cloud9 makes sense for us. The group I work with is focused on teaching programming to people who aren't traditionally represented in software development and sometimes they don't even have their own computers and have had to borrow a computer from a friend to do the work.
With Cloud9 they can develop on any computer they have access to, whether their's, a friend's, or even one at the public library. It is just one less barrier to being able to engage people.
I've run into the use case while traveling abroad where I don't have a computer (out of paranoia / lack of security).
Internet cafés are everywhere but setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long... so far it's made development fairly impractical, especially because they're often very old Windows machines. I've had good experiences with C9 so far, though I'd like to see how it pans out under that use case.
>setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long
It is a Not Unreasonable (TM) time investment to automate setting up your dev environment in the way you would a prod environment. emacs.d and other dotfiles in source control, masterless Puppet or Chef on your laptop, etc. If you're willing to go as far as installing Vagrant manually, the rest can be made pretty easy.
Those tech companies should also provide high end machines to developers. I'm glad the last two places I've worked provided high end MacBook pros but also allow devs to use their own machines so inevitably there are a couple of Linux and Windows folks.
Interesting that for me it was the startups that provided good machines while the enterprises provided 4 years old lenovo laptops with not so good batteries not the specs needed to use a VM effectively
Just got back from paternaty leave and got new MacBook pro. Not sure if got lucky or this will be common practice. I'm from the IBM corporation. So one should not generalize ;) P.S. I guess only people who get crappy HW complain and this creates the ilussion that all corporations give crappy HW.
