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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#31

Post by dylan604 »

Gigachad wrote: post #10
p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.

whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazing and try to change everything now, or slowly acclimate to the workflow and then start suggesting changes/updates from inside. if you're hired as a 10x dev, then maybe guns blazing works, but if you're not, i'd suggest the latter.

Re: Atom was archived today

#32

Post by esprehn »

p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins.

That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up quite slow.

VSCode's architecture worked much better in real world configurations, and it turns out better performance wins in the editor space, even if it meant losing certain customizations (up to a limit). The architecture also allowed seamless remote editing, something Atom never could have done.

The interesting thing has always been that both were built on Electron. Atom's developers had built all the tools and primitives needed, they just didn't have the understanding of the long term ecosystem effects of their design.

Re: Atom was archived today

#33

Post by deafpolygon »

anyfoo wrote: post #9
azhenley wrote: post #5

I had a lot of fun whipping up plug-ins within minutes for Atom! It let me try out ideas very quickly.

emacs may probably let you do this too, and better. The big problem is: You need to know emacs beforehand, which is seriously a lot, and likely bizarre to any modern person. I do, and I will likely never give it up, but I've been at it since the 90s. In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul.…

Then the joke evolved to that it couldn't open files 8MB or larger without hanging, at one point.

Re: Atom was archived today

#34

Post by tikhonj »

dijit wrote: post #15
umvi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.

But what value is that, over the website?

Two big ones I can think of:

1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough

2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access

Re: Atom was archived today

#36

Post by bearon »

Make no mistake... This project, Atom. Provided the runway that others copied, then improved upon (and on and on... with plenty of funding).

Atom provided the seed, excitement and vision for what is possible on this platform, and should be proud of that fact.

Re: Atom was archived today

#37

Post by rob74 »

p-e-w wrote: post #18
umvi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.

Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.

Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser version and never looked back, even after upgrading to a new machine. My laptop's CPU and memory usage are still thanking me...

Re: Atom was archived today

#38

Post by thispbowden »

p-e-w wrote: post #18
umvi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.

Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.

Like a JVM?

Re: Atom was archived today

#40

Post by brundolf »

esprehn wrote: post #32
p-e-w wrote: post #7

Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta. The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engine…

Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins. That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up…

And VSCode is still pretty customizable/extensible- in most of the ways that people really cared about. It found a really solid balance
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