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Atom was archived today

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Re: Atom was archived today

#431

Post by kevinmchugh »

heather45879 wrote: post #411
hnlmorg wrote: post #189

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…

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 too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?

GUIs can change layout and users have to spend time learning where things are. Someone who is using a text editor is probably comfortable editing text.

Re: Atom was archived today

#432

Post by brunoborges »

rodw wrote: post #204
IshKebab wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree you have to keep the number of VSCode windows quite low (5 is ok, 10 will make it struggle) but in fairness how many times have you had 10 instances of Visual Studio or IntelliJ running? I've never got close to that.

"No worse than a Java-based app" is sorta damning with faint praise. Java is notorious for being ill-suited for user-facing desktop apps - and justifiably so, at least historically. But I agree with your core point. I use VS Code all the time, regularly switching between maybe a dozen different projects, and I personally don't run into performance issues or resource constraints very often. Certainly less often than w…

> Java is notorious for being ill-suited for user-facing desktop apps - and justifiably so, at least historically.

I'm on a trip in Brazil, and so far I saw 1 commercial system built in Java at a grocery store cashier, and 3 Government systems: Border and Customs office's computer, Postal Office ("Correios") point of sale (a desktop), and the software that must be used for tax return by all citizens (IRPF).

All of them used by millions of people directly or indirectly, all of them implemented in Java Swing.

Re: Atom was archived today

#433

Post by charrondev »

heather45879 wrote: post #411
hnlmorg wrote: post #189

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…

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,…

As far as I know most configuration can be done through GUI. You have both JSON and GUI views of the preferences. It seems the GUI is automatically generated from the JSON-schema that validates and gives autocomplete to the JSON editor.

Re: Atom was archived today

#434

Post by pharke »

flohofwoe wrote: post #361
wokwokwok wrote: post #257

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…

It's not like commercial alternatives are automatically better though, see Visual Studio ( some aspects of VStudio are still better than VSCode, but VSCode has caught up fast, and as IDE for multi-language projects it is already better - the only important feature that's still inferior in VSCode compared to VStudio is the debugger integration). If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave…

I think that's a pretty bad choice of comparison. For one, they're two products under the same company. Secondly, Visual Studio is a bit of a dinosaur that suffers (and somewhat benefits) from a long history so it's easy for the VSCode team to look at that and just trim the fat and correct mistakes. They also target somewhat different domains with Visual Studio having a longer history in C++ and VSCode being more geared towards web dev (yes I know it's widely used for other languages but web is the leader and obvious target). Visual Studio is also by far not the best in its class, using IntelliJ products side by side with Visual Studio is like night and day especially when it comes to C++. A better comparison for VSCode would be something like Sublime Text since it's in the same product space of "lightweight" code editors with a focus on web.

Re: Atom was archived today

#435

Post by dasil003 »

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).

Merging. Sure you can “branch” on svn but you merge at your own risk.

Re: Atom was archived today

#436

Post by prmoustache »

p-e-w wrote: post #115
JonathonW wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering" in a world where vi and emacs exist seems like a bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not even a fan of either (VS Code is my daily driver; I like my GUI editors and I like them to behave like normal apps on the platform I'm running).

Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity. With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment for that language ready to go. This is light years ahead of the traditional editors, and saves many hours of time. Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which…

Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity. With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a huge security breach.

(corrected for you)

Re: Atom was archived today

#437

Post by oblio »

viridian wrote: post #389
rahen wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To put it more simply, software can't be more simple in aggregate because we can trivially rely on insanely complex components others have built and made available. Components which were simply not available back then.

Yes, the glue on top might be trivial, but even that frequently isn't.

And if anything breaks down, the humans at the top are normally expected to handle it, no matter where in the stack it is.

Re: Atom was archived today

#438

Post by prmoustache »

viridian wrote: post #379
rahen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading such posts really makes me wonder how people wrote UNIX (up to V7) with just ed and an ASR33. And productive, they were. I've seen some old timers on ACME who dislike even the "distraction" of syntax coloring with modern editor such as vim. I wonder how they would fare with something like MS VSCode.

Having worked with a handful of terminal CLI purists I'm convinced most of the people who bang the drum hard for vi and emacs aren't nearly as productive as they think they are, and instead evangelize it largely for some mixture of these reasons: 1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation 2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are 3) they wish…

> 1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation

Sounds like having a strong preference for keyboard only to edit text and code is the natural way.

I don't think most vscode user are using mouse a lot either and if they do that, they are doing it the slow and inefficient way as vscode can be entirely piloted with the keyboard as well.

Re: Atom was archived today

#439

Post by ryukoposting »

herbst wrote: post #271
Sad90sNerd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it was (and is ) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...

It's been a while when I've used VS code in production but on Linux the issues with Atom have been less from the very start and VS Code simply never delivered the performance increase everyone was talking about. Maybe because I never made it an IDE but used it as editor. On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.

Having used Atom and VS Code on an old laptop in college, VS Code definitely does a better job when you throw it a large file, a first-gen i5, and 4GB of RAM. Likewise, at my first internship, I tried sublime on my work computer, which they had clearly just grabbed from the storage room (Windows 7! In 2018!). Sublime exploded into a million pieces.

My point is this: if we're being honest, all Electron-based editors suck. They're slow, and community-provided extensions are buggy and they integrate awkwardly with each other. But in my world (embedded firmware) there simply isn't a less-terrible option. VS Code is the least-terrible among them.

Re: Atom was archived today

#440

Post by prmoustache »

JonathonW wrote: post #106
thallada wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run vim and emacs in a gui app. I run neovim in neovide which imo is the best experience for vim these days. Vim's builtin terminal is good enough now that you can ditch running it inside tmux/terminal.

Vim and emacs do not adhere to platform conventions anywhere, unless your platform happens to be "emacs".

Anything running on electron, such as vscode, do not adhere to platform conventions either.
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