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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#381
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except it only works for trivial languages.

Re: Atom was archived today

#382
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…

> VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering

According to whom? Personally, I find Jetbrains products a far superior experience.

Re: Atom was archived today

#383

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…

As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.

> nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl

There's this editor called vim. You should have a look.

Re: Atom was archived today

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VSCode isn't the most complex of projects or most widespread etc. But from perspective of engineering a large project is about making 100s of small and large choices. In hindsight, lot of them are wrong. Take any software WinNT, Linux, Atom, IntelliJ, Adobe* you can now with all the extra information available today can find some decisions that were wrong. With VSCode these wrong decisions are very few and minor comp…

By your logic Sublime is an even higher feat of engineering since it made even better engineering decisions.

Ultimately they’re both very fancy text editors, not ‘the greatest feat of modern software engineering’.

I’d happily switch from Sublime to VScode or EMacs or any of the other umpteen code editors. I’d shudder to have to go back from Git to SVN. Even Mercurial seems milquetoast in comparison.

Similarly, what about the Linux kernel?

What about C?

Re: Atom was archived today

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival. You mean like a nail gun? The kind that all professional roofers use?

Does one need to "get to know a nail gun first" to use it well?

Considering that nails from a nail gun have a habit of following the grain in surprising ways (possibly causing the nail to do a 180 degree turn and find your finger), yes, it is important for a prospective user to "get to know it".

Re: Atom was archived today

#388
post #232

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. Its good, but not that good. There are still some pretty basic features that full fledged…

Surprise, surprise, emacs was there before you: run one daemon, open as many windows as you'd like.

You don't even need the daemon: start Emacs, find-file-other-frame, done.

Re: Atom was archived today

#389
post #330
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity of any software system built in the 70s and 80s is laughably low compared to the biggest system we build today. Their constraints were much harsher, but the fact of the matter is the end result was rather simple by today's standards. I think just the Bluetooth stack in a modern OS contains as much code as an entire Unix kernel from any time up to 1990 or so.

Don't underestimate the complexity of software built in the seventies either for the business, financial or scientific world. We already had virtual machines, HA, realtime and distributed computing back then. Some code running at CERN or NASA was far more complex than a bluetooth stack, yet was also written with teletypes or ADM-3A style terminals.

As someone who has worked on both sides of the coin in the finance world in consumer credit processing, I think the person you are replying to is more right than wrong, but it's also a matter of how you view the idea of complexity.

I've worked on 30+ year old systems where the code base is absolutely immense, but the of this stuff is very, very low on average compared to the magical bullshit that happens on a simple UI render of some template react app in 2022.

Folks had very little in the way of abstractions at their fingertips, and the languages themselves weren't nearly so helpful in helping you manage complexity, so applications were usually long, shallow, and operating under a litany of fixed boundaries that define and drive a significant amount of behavior for you.

The biggest source of complexity was having to manage your own unique `personal operating system` of bespoke resources at any given time, where each developer was carved into an incomplete walking repository of both business processes and software practices with the passing of each year.

Re: Atom was archived today

#390

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…

The first and last time I tried Sublime Text, it turned out to be impossible to properly have a file open in two editors (or tabs or whatever Sublime's term is): any changes made in one editor were only synchronized to the other editor upon saving the file. I really tried to like Sublime, but the lack of such a basic feature was a total no-go. That was several years ago, has the situation changed?
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