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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#411

Post by heather45879 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #189
p-e-w wrote: 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…

Honestly I’m not a fan of VSCode as a user. It’s too generic and lacks identity (too powerful to edit simple configs); it auto-updates every time I start it; it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?

If my goal is to program in language X then I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about.

That being said, it’s very stable and performs well—I will give the devs a massive kudos for that. Also if I did a lot of NodeJS dev work it would probably classify as a proper IDE for that.

But all-in-all I would prefer something purpose-built with minimal configuration out the gate for development workloads (C/C++, Java, C#) and a more minimal editor (nano, vim, eMacs, notepad++, geany, etc) for editing configs.

Re: Atom was archived today

#412

Post by fomine3 »

criddell wrote: post #403
jorvi wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I’d shudder to have to go back from Git to SVN. What are some of the Git features that make a big difference to you? I use them on different projects and I end up using them both in the same very basic way (check out code, make changes, check code in).

local commit

Re: Atom was archived today

#413

Post by ellisv »

I use Atom daily. There are many times when I need a simple, powerful text editor but not a full blown IDE.

I knew this day was coming but didn’t prepare for it.

Re: Atom was archived today

#414

Post by ShredKazoo »

rodw wrote: post #52
skyfaller wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.

Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s >

What's the difference between Electron apps that are "noticeably built with Electron" and ones that aren't?

Re: Atom was archived today

#415

Post by mkl »

dmitrygr wrote: post #78
PetahNZ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening large files is a pretty niche case anyway. Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files.

> Even CLI tools like less and grep are slow with things like searching muti GB files. In what universe? I routinely use "less -n" to open terabyte-sized text files.

In what context do you have terabyte-sized text files?

Re: Atom was archived today

#416

Post by scarface74 »

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…

> While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron

That’s not the positive thing that you think it is.

Re: Atom was archived today

#417

Post by sheepscreek »

hnlmorg wrote: post #189
p-e-w wrote: 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…

I respect your experience and opinion, but you’re missing the point here.

VSCode delivered a fantastic user experience. It reached a product market fit other editors could only dream of (let alone any editor based on browser tech). This, must have required engineering smarts and very thoughtful collaboration between product and engineering.

Hard engineering = delivering the best possible outcome within tight constraints/requirements. I’m sure the VSCode team was trying to hit a very specific number in responsiveness, startup time and memory usage.

Yes, compilers fall in that category as well as modern chip manufacturing (single digit nanometer fab FTW!). Those folks are the unsung heroes. However, we cannot discredit the fantastic product experience of VSCode. It was not possible without some innovation, clever engineering and a well thought out architecture. (I am sure they learned from Atom’s failings)

Update: > The VSCode team didn't have to make Electron. They got to use it, though. Along with the various lessons learned by the Atom project.

Yes! They are progressively a huge leap forward, built on the contributions of others before them. Now the VSCode framework has spawned a new generator of tools (such as Obsidian).

Re: Atom was archived today

#418

Post by robertlagrant »

hnlmorg wrote: post #189
p-e-w wrote: 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…

> 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.

The VSCode team didn't have to make Electron. They got to use it, though. Along with the various lessons learned by the Atom project.

Re: Atom was archived today

#420

Post by haolez »

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…

Personally, I prefer CoffeeScript. The code gets more concise, it stimulates a coding style that's more objective and less "enterprisy" than TypeScript with all the excessive OO stuff. A simpler and more concise language attracts more contributors overtime.

However, TypeScript has clearly won and static typing can help a lot with autocomplete stuff, so there is no point fighting back.

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