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

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

#451

Post by JimDabell »

eviks wrote: post #254
JimDabell wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.

You understand it just fine, you're just trying to pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational while painting the obvious objections based on the real world as meaningless noise.

Your point did not come across. It still isn’t. I don’t know what you mean by “pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational”. You aren’t making sense to me. I absolutely do not “understand it just fine”.

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

#452

Post by maratc »

JimDabell wrote: post #233
Animats wrote: post #230

- 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…

> - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? Amen. Postel’s Law was wrong: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413 We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every o…

Just to remind you that text [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal.

I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead.

[0]: By I mean and by I mean , and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be.

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

#454

Post by KingMob »

cobertos wrote: post #133
dunham wrote: post #75

The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.

Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.

I don't personally know, but I used to use the creator (Granger)'s previous work, the Clojure live-running editor LightTable.

LT was cool, but they abandoned it with insufficient hand-off when it was 80-90% done to work on Eve.

I know a bunch of people were unhappy that LightTable wasn't finished, especially because they raised money via Kickstarter for it.

Maybe Eve was too ambitious. Maybe funding never materialized. Maybe they just got bored and couldn't finish. Maybe they pissed off their audience.

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

#455

Post by JimDabell »

maratc wrote: post #452
JimDabell wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? Amen. Postel’s Law was wrong: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413 We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every o…

Just to remind you that text [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal. I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead. [0]: By I mean and by I mean , and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be .

That caused plenty of incompatibilities in the past. At one point, Internet Explorer would parse that and end up with something that wasn’t even a tree.

HTML is not a set of instructions that you follow. It’s a terrible format if you treat it that way.

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

#456

Post by chrismorgan »

bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

> Google Hangouts:

Which particular thing called Hangouts? There were at least two, frankly I’d say more like four.

Google and Microsoft are both terrible about reusing names for different things in confusing ways.

> Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps.

And Hangouts was part of that problem. Remember Google Talk/Chat? That was where things began, and in my family we never wanted Hangouts, Talk/Chat was better.

Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Talk, Voice… I’ve probably forgotten at least two more names, knowing Google. Most of these products have substantial overlap with most of the rest.

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

#457

Post by Qem »

dlcarrier wrote: post #219
snovymgodym wrote: post #2

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…

The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20 years behind.

20 years behind get us back to Windows XP, that had a better experience than Windows 11 anyway.

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

#459

Post by hardwarepirate »

abeyer wrote: post #331
hardwarepirate wrote: post #291

https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learni…

Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company outweighed anything good they put out.

how so?

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

#460

Post by lifty »

znpy wrote: post #332
v3ss0n wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas

Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me. Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.

It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.
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