I don't think you're being rude. You make a decent point about the likelihood of erlang repl users and chrome os users not overlapping too much. But I wasn't trying to suggest that the only justification for building such a tool is to have it available on something like chrome os. My statement was more meant to make people think about situations in the future where this might be useful, and to draw attention to how little you need to know to be able to use this. Pretty much everyone now knows how to use a web-browser. That's all I need to know to use runroot. I don't need to understand screen. I don't need to understand ssh (and install a 3rd party client if I'm on Windows). I don't need to have any erlang libraries installed. In order to share what I'm doing with others I don't need to make any assumptions about their environments except that they have a web-browser.

I know to you and me these aren't major hurdles. But we have years of experience and knowledge of these "basic" tools that most other people don't. So as a teaching tool for those without such experience this is great. Also I think you underestimate how much inertia needs to be overcome for most people to try something new. This drastically reduces the friction to trying out new languages.