bkil vs. programming

I'm still considering which of these would be the most preferred for a beginner showing off talent: HelioHost unlimited CPU, RAM, MySQL, bandwidth, 500MB disk, 2 cron jobs/day PythonAnywhere 100sec/day prioritized CPU, 512MB RAM, 1 daily task, low bandwidth, Internet whitelist OpenShift 3 gears of 1GB disk and 512MB RAM each AlwaysData 64MB RAM, 1GB/month traffic, 10MB disk, non-commercial use only

"Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want." Paul Graham describes how they had great success with webshop SaaS  a decade before the concept became mainstream. They stayed ahead of the competition by not shooting themselves in the foot, adding: "We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible." The end result speaks for itself: "The people who understood our technology best were the customers. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in either, but they noticed that it worked really well." Although the story is from two decades ago, the lessons learned seem to be evergreen, so it's a good reading:  Beating the averages (2001)

Many have desired to collaborate in the development of Google Apps Scripts. Two outstanding issues had been open for some time in this area: Issue 1959: Collaborative editing of scripts Issue 217: Make Google Code the back-end version control for collaborative scripting A feature offered from June enables API access of script source code. This potentially enables connection to an external repository, like Google Code or GitHub. See the linked screencast and talk or the API below. YouTube: Apps Script Crash Course: Import/Export Apps Script Code Google Developers: Importing and Exporting Projects After breaking this barrier, I can now start gathering some of my more useful scripts to share via bkil-open, though I'll probably simply copy&paste for now.

EDIT: updated on 2016-02-06 (fixed links, added QtCreator) The people I've discussed refactoring with usually got pretty enthusiastic about it when showing them what can be done in properly designed languages like Java, Erlang or Haskell. They asked whether these kind of things were doable for weaker programming languages like C and C++ by free open source tools. I don't have much experience in this topic, as I haven't done bigger projects in this language yet, and the small ones I did were usually properly designed for the purpose from the start. So I looked around for possible solutions , and doing a few web searches yielded the following links. I may try some of these in the future just for curiosity. Be warned that not all listed features are available or complete. If you have experience with any of these, or with any refactoring tool for that matter, please let us hear your voice in the comments. (Maybe it would be worthwhile to open a wiki about available ref...