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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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431–440 of 912 posts

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#431

Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.

A few commits recently. There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead: - F# (Fable) - ReasonML - OCaml (Bucklescript) - Haskell - PureScript IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.

OCaml / Reason (Melange)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#432
post #45

Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…

I use the core product for my SaaS apps. Great platform, does what it needs to do. Haven’t felt the need to switch. Sometimes tempted to move to a single VPS with Coolify or Dokku, but not interested in taking on the server admin burden.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#434

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

> XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done.

This is not true. The reason it died was because Internet Explorer 6 didn’t support it, and that hung around for about a decade and a half. There was no way for XHTML to succeed given that situation.

The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed React.

People can deal with strict syntax. They can manage it with JSX, they can manage it with JSON, they can manage it with JavaScript, they can manage it with every back-end language like Python, PHP, Ruby, etc. The idea that people see XHTML being parsed strictly and give up has never had any truth to it.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#437
post #117

Microsoft Silverlight. Full C# instead of god forbidden js. Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier). MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup. Ex…

Back in the day Microsoft sent someone to our university to demo all of their new and upcoming products. I remember Vista (then named Longhorn) and Silverlight being among them. I also remember people being particularly impressed by the demo they gave of the latter, but everything swiftly falling apart when someone queried whether it worked in other browsers. This was at a time when IE was being increasingly challenged by browsers embracing open standards. So there was an element of quiet amusement/frustration in seeing them continue to not get it.
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