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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#261
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

VSCode is good but as someone who’s been writing software for nearly 40 years, I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way. Compilers, operating systems, browser engines (unfortunately) and reverse engineering proprietary hardware/firmware are all significantly harder challenges than writing an IDE. in fact there have been excellent IDEs around for decades before VSCode came along. Yes the indu…

Spot on.

And I would rather say that Atom was an engineering feat in terms of that they developed Electron and tree-sitter.

One also has to take into account that Atom started long before VS Code so for sure the VS Code team could make much more informed decisions and learn from the "failures" of Atom. And things like TypeScript wasn't around when Atom started.

Re: Atom was archived today

#262
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 really missed all of that. Atom is still the editor installed on all my systems. The one single thing I work with every day since many many years.

Re: Atom was archived today

#263
post #11
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…

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.

I don't think that people actually hate on electron. It's more that we hate on tiny tools written in electron.

A small usb stick copy tool? here take 300mb and more to get the 1 minute job done. A bash one liner.

Re: Atom was archived today

#265
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.

I haven't worked for someone in years and that totally passed on me. I've tried code several times because of specific platforms it has plugins for but I never seen it as even comparable, at least not more than sublime.

No idea what problems people had with Atom, but I really hope some fork let it live on.

Re: Atom was archived today

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not always true, sometimes first (and worse) is better. VHS vs Betamax comes to mind.

Except that VHS was released after Betamax, so second & worse video quality won that time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax

This IS an urban legend which deserves to die.

VHS wasn't of discernible worse picture quality but provided much better usability at the same time.

Re: Atom was archived today

#267

I just uninstalled the app. I'll miss it. What's the most popular replacement for a text editor with code support? VS Code? I was looking into Nova, but I'd assume an open-source editor would be updated more frequently and have more themes etc.

No post body was provided.

Re: Atom was archived today

#268
post #75
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

May be true but I feel joy when using atom and annoyance when using vscode. There is a subtle aesthetic to atom that feels so much better. I also feel a perceptible lag with vscode at times. If it is better engineered it sometimes seems noticeably less performant.

Re: Atom was archived today

#269
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.

Second that....that statement would be even sad (maybe even more) in the 60's.

Re: Atom was archived today

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.

Yes, it’s not. It’s just free. What people mean when they say “I can’t believe how good this is” is: “I can’t believe how good this is for something I got for free” That’s not engineering excellence. It’s just engineering; being given away as a loss leader. Vscode is good and well maintained, but that’s because a lot of money is being spent making it so. Enjoy it; there’s no harm in taking money people are giving awa…

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