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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#831

Post by pjmlp »

mike_hearn wrote: post #830
pjmlp wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunely Microsoft didn't invest heavily enough on COM tooling, it sucks in 2025 as much as in the 1990's.

Sure, why would they? COM was rendered irrelevant by the move to the web. Microsoft lost out on the app serving side, and when they dropped the ball on ActiveX by not having proper UI design or sandboxing they lost out on the client too. Probably the primary use case outside of legacy OPC is IT departments writing PowerShell scripts or Office plugins (though those are JS based now too). COM has been legacy tech for d…

Because since Windows Vista all new APIs are COM based, Win32 C API is basically stuck on Windows XP view of the universe, with minor exceptions here and there.

Anyone that has to deal with Windows programming quickly discovers that COM is not the legacy people talk about on the Internet.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#832

Post by mike_hearn »

AfterHIA wrote: post #773
renehsz wrote: post #470

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist hist…

OK, go use Windows then, it's the dream architecture you always wanted ;)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/com-tech...

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#833

Post by KronisLV »

saratogacx wrote: post #815
KronisLV wrote: post #358

Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, th…

There's a commercial tool that has been available for a long time called Source Insight[1]. It isn't exactly cheap but I've used it in the past for both code splunking and editing and it's was a pretty useful tool. [1] https://www.sourceinsight.com/

Thanks for the link!

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#834

Post by Timwi »

JimDabell wrote: post #426
Timwi wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient). Meanwhile, local files with the doctype would be treated as XHTML, so people assumed the docty…

> The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient). None of that is correct. It was perfectly spec. compliant to label XHTML as text/html. The s…

Okay, I guess I got a fair bit of the details wrong. However, there's one detail I want to push back on:

> In addition, [XHTML1] defines a profile of use of XHTML which is compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may also be labeled as text/html.

If you read this carefully, you'll see that it's not saying that text/html can be used to label XHTML. It's saying that you can use text/html if you write your XHTML in such a way that it's compatible with HTML 4.01, because the browser will parse and interpret it as HTML.

You're correct that the doctype wasn't the reason it was treated as tag soup. It was instead because of the parts of XHTML that are not directly compatible with HTML 4.01.

The mismatch between local files and websites served as text/html was very real and I experienced it myself. It's curious that you'd think I'd make it up. There were differences in behavior, especially when JavaScript was involved (notably: Element.tagName is all-uppercase in HTML but lowercase in XHTML) and it is absolutely the case that developers like myself blamed this on XHTML.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#835

Post by latexr »

latexr wrote: post #582
emigre wrote: post #326

The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.

Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom’s fate was sealed.

> As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code

Correction: I meant “As soon as Microsoft bought GitHub”.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#836

Post by easyThrowaway »

jasode wrote: post #367
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

We could've made the same arguments for supporting Adobe Flash on the iPhone.

And yet Apple decided that no, this time we do it the "right" way[1], stuck with plain HTML/CSS/JS and frankly we're all better for it.

[1] I'm aware this is a massive oversimplification and there were more cynical reasons behind dropping the flash runtime from iOS, but they're not strictly relevant to this discussion.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#837

Post by PufPufPuf »

hshdhdhehd wrote: post #749
PufPufPuf wrote: post #255

Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/ In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then. I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will bui…

Wow, why didnt this take off?

My best guess is:

- not backed by a huge corporation (React = FB, TypeScript = Microsoft, Next.js = Vercel, ...)

- many of the ideas I listed above were controversial at the time of introduction, I can imagine that Opa must have felt overwhelming

- Opa didn't actually have components or state management, which was a pain point on which React originally took off

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#838

Post by executesorder66 »

justinclift wrote: post #531
cardanome wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to train an LLM with the windows source code and ask it to write an windows clone. Apparently copyright law only applies for humans, generative AI gets away with stealing because there is too much monetary interest involved in looking the other way.

Wow, so you're saying "Windows but with even less reliability and more security problems plus tech debt"? I don't think the world really needs that. :)

>"Windows but with even less reliability and more security problems plus tech debt"

To me that just sound like it will make ReactOS much more Windows-like. So it's probably a win for the project. \s

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#839

Post by easyThrowaway »

dimal wrote: post #549
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plai…

The most sensible option would be to just show the error for the ad part of the website.

Also, the whole argument falls apart the moment the banner has a javascript error too. Should we attempt to run malformed code just in case? Or should a browser start shipping shims and compatibility fixes for known broken websites like microsoft do for windows apps?

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#840

Post by bazoom42 »

lucketone wrote: post #430
bazoom42 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages. It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.

if developer accidentally left opening comment at the start of the html. Rhetorical question: Should the browser display page even if it is commented out? There is some bar for what is expected to work. If all browsers would consistently error out on unclosed tags, then it would definitely force developers to close tags, it would force it become common knowledge, second nature.

As for your “rhetorical” question, you can find the answer in the HTML spec.
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