As someone who has taught JavaScript workshops in which 10% of the class wasted half the class trying to install  Node &amp; NPM just to set up a development server that could reliably serve static assets (the last thing I expected to be a problem), I can attest to the value of this.<p>Granted, plnkr.co probably would have worked just as well, but giving everybody a consistent (and persistent, and reasonably performant) dev environment in an educational setting makes a huge difference.