Live data from Hacker News

Atom was archived today

github.com

341–350 of 614 posts

Re: Atom was archived today

#341

Brief comment + total noob question here: I've been using atom for several years now to main a few sites. I have always found it a pleasure to work in, but then admittedly I am probably using a small percentage of the features that it offer. What does it mean that the project (or any project) is archived? Does it mean that it no longer has maintainers? Should we stop using it because security will worsen due to lack…

Are you on Windows? Notepad++ in case

Re: Atom was archived today

#342
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course a lot goes on but pre-LSP and post-LSP are day and night. There is now a huge amount of serious language tooling that _isn't_ locked up into one or several editors. Now some might point out that LSP-based stuff is, like, bloat. Sure, OK. But there's a lot of motivation to do work that can pay off across the board. So much language stuff was based off of random regexes! It's hard to overstate how much better…

LSP is nice, but it's not an engineering marvel. It's just a text protocol. It's not even a great text protocol; it's okay , but not great. There's been lots of "LSP-like" protocols over the years, even decades, it's just that none of them really became a standard (partly because no one actually invested the time in writing one, and it just used an "ad-hoc protocol"). And of course the general concept of "process A c…

The thing is it successfully had work put in so that it’s a standard. “They did a thing that basically no one succeeded in doing” is, imo, proof of something.

Re: Atom was archived today

#343
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course a lot goes on but pre-LSP and post-LSP are day and night. There is now a huge amount of serious language tooling that _isn't_ locked up into one or several editors. Now some might point out that LSP-based stuff is, like, bloat. Sure, OK. But there's a lot of motivation to do work that can pay off across the board. So much language stuff was based off of random regexes! It's hard to overstate how much better…

I don't know what LSP is or why you'd think it's anything special or game-changing. It just seems to be a generic interface to describe language bindings, which most text editors have. In practice it's mostly a bad thing because any advanced language has special needs which will end up difficult to address by funneling everything through a common interface.

It is a generic interface which also helps with many capabilities, including proper refactoring, formatting, and the like. Since VSCode does so much through it, basically all nontrivial interaction with the code base can also be used in other editors.

A far cry from the days of sublime text’s regex-based autocomplete

Re: Atom was archived today

#344

It might sound controversial, but for me Atom was almost a 1 to 1 Sublime copy with worse performance and quality. It was slow and ugly. It’s only quality was that it was 0$. It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog. I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of…

It's unfortunate because all I want is a notepad with syntax highlighting and Atom with most packages disabled offered that.

I don't need code complete, or a terminal, or extensions, or anything else VScode offers. I suppose now is a good time to write my own notepad :/

Re: Atom was archived today

#345

Brief comment + total noob question here: I've been using atom for several years now to main a few sites. I have always found it a pleasure to work in, but then admittedly I am probably using a small percentage of the features that it offer. What does it mean that the project (or any project) is archived? Does it mean that it no longer has maintainers? Should we stop using it because security will worsen due to lack…

I know you've said not to discuss VS Code, but VS Code was pretty much an Atom clone at release, and it would still be a very easy switch. Many of us back then loved Atom and switched simply because VS Code was so similar but could also do a find-and-replace on a large project without crashing.

Re: Atom was archived today

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked around some of the vscode folk, there are a lot of them there who do it out of love for the product and the betterment of developer tooling. Someone should write up the story of how it started, and how it got to where it is. The backstory is fascinating.

They may be making it out of love, but they’re not the ones giving it away. The ones who are giving it away are not doing it out of love.

Re: Atom was archived today

#347
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LSP is nice, but it's not an engineering marvel. It's just a text protocol. It's not even a great text protocol; it's okay , but not great. There's been lots of "LSP-like" protocols over the years, even decades, it's just that none of them really became a standard (partly because no one actually invested the time in writing one, and it just used an "ad-hoc protocol"). And of course the general concept of "process A c…

The thing is it successfully had work put in so that it’s a standard. “They did a thing that basically no one succeeded in doing” is, imo, proof of something.

I don't think anyone tried to really make a standard, as far as I know. But even if they did, there's lots of reasons why some things take off and others don't: putting in the work as you mentioned, whether it's any good, marketing, state of other tooling and tech, zeitgeist at the time ("timing"), etc.

Would something like Go have taken off 20 years ago? I'm not so sure, the zeitgeist at the time was very much in the direction of dynamic languages. And would Python take off if it was released today? Not so sure about that either.

But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work.

Re: Atom was archived today

#348
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold VSCode to be at least equal to those achievements. Having used dozens of text editors and IDEs in the course of my programming career, I can appreciate how non-obvious it is for a piece of software this complex to work so fucking well all the time. And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that o…

VSCode over mRNA vaccines? That's too obvious of a troll, please, stop here for a second, take a deep breath and reconsider. It's okay, you can let go of your past mistake, nobody will blame you.

Yesterday p-e-w was arguing all programming should be done in English and IDNs never used, today that VSCode is the greatest engineering achievement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995265

Re: Atom was archived today

#349
Rest In Peace. The Atom devs did an amazing job, but failed to get enough market share. I used Atom a lot at home, and some at work. Work jumped on VS Code as soon as VS Code came out. I think in part it was the ease of use, but I also think a major factor was that it came from Microsoft, so work immediately accepted it as better than something from people managers didn't recognize.

If VS Code didn't have MS funding them and marketing them, then I think the outcome would have been much different. Maybe. The Atom devs did make some design choices that seemed weird. As one commenter noted, Coffeescript is a good example. I personally liked the extreme customizability and plugin ecosystem.

Re: Atom was archived today

#350
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.

> People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. It really does come down to how people build on top of it. I tried opening a 2gb log file in Atom and it took like 10 minutes before crashing. VSCode on the other hand, while a bit slow, opened it and I could search quickly and scroll it without any issue at all. That was what caused me to switch.

Wow man.

Your comment brought me memories. This exactly was what made me switch over too back then.

Pre-VS setup was: Atom for most cases but [large files | quickly edit something] was with Brackets (It was unbelievably swift)

VS Code comes in and says: Don't worry. I got you!

Post reply on HN