The editor stopped being slow

The first version took a beat to appear, and then another beat before the cursor would blink. Individually those beats were nothing. Together they made the whole thing feel like software you have to wait for, and that feeling is very hard to argue someone out of.

Most of the fix was deleting things: a syntax theme we weren’t using, a language server we didn’t need for a six-line lesson, and an autocomplete that kept suggesting APIs a beginner has never heard of.

The rest was ordering. The editor now paints before the runtime is ready, so you can start typing immediately and the run button quietly becomes available a moment later. You almost never get there first.

There’s a general lesson in here that we keep relearning: for a beginner, waiting isn’t neutral. It reads as ‘this is complicated’, and complicated is exactly what we’re trying not to be.