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GitHub dropped Pygments

greghendershott.com

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Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#31

Post by skrebbel »

walterbell wrote: post #28
walterbell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing?

Dear downvoters, have you heard of the Streisand effect? This thread now has the most downvotes (-14) of the many comments I've posted on HN. There is nothing factually incorrect in my posts. Why does this question deserve five downvotes? > Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing? Edit: -20 downvotes. Previous record was -3.

People are downvoting you because you're bikeshedding like a madman. The post I'm replying to will soon be downvoted too, because you're whining about getting downvoted.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#32

Post by esfandia »

isomorphic wrote: post #8

This sort of thing feeds my paranoia about GitHub being a giant single point of failure in the open-source world. I know the argument: Someone, somewhere has a copy of each repo checked out, so we (the nebulous "we") could reconstruct everything from the diaspora of ".git" directories. It just bothers me to think how dependent OSS has become upon GitHub.

Would a P2P version of GitHub make sense? Each outward-facing local repo would provide a GitHub-like interface for browsing code, submitting PRs etc., and would in addition route repo search requests to neighboring repos using something like a Gnutella protocol.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#33

Post by walterbell »

skrebbel wrote: post #31
walterbell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear downvoters, have you heard of the Streisand effect? This thread now has the most downvotes (-14) of the many comments I've posted on HN. There is nothing factually incorrect in my posts. Why does this question deserve five downvotes? > Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing? Edit: -20 downvotes. Previous record was -3.

People are downvoting you because you're bikeshedding like a madman. The post I'm replying to will soon be downvoted too, because you're whining about getting downvoted.

Thanks for the explanation, and the new word.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#34

Post by Buge »

walterbell wrote: post #28
walterbell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing?

Dear downvoters, have you heard of the Streisand effect? This thread now has the most downvotes (-14) of the many comments I've posted on HN. There is nothing factually incorrect in my posts. Why does this question deserve five downvotes? > Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing? Edit: -20 downvotes. Previous record was -3.

This situation is very different from the Streisand effect. In the Streisand effect a single party is trying silence everyone else. Here everyone is trying to silence you.

They are nearly opposite situations. A minority trying to silence a majority vs a majority trying to silence a minority.

In both situations the majority wins.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#35

Post by rsanheim »

lexcorvus wrote: post #23
cespare wrote: post #4

I assume the new syntax highlighter is way, way faster than pygments. It's written in C++ rather than Python. (Atom uses the same grammar format, but a Node implementation.)

The new highlighter may be faster, but is syntax highlighting frequently a bottleneck at GitHub? That seems unlikely.

In large diffs, it can definitely be a problem.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#36

Post by username223 »

scott_karana wrote: post #7
walterbell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing?

Giving users the choice of "slow" in a webapp means that both hardware and software deployment/management/purchasing is greatly complicated.

"Web 2.0: don't like it? Tough shit."

That's the nice thing about actual software with actual versions that you actually install: it doesn't change out from under you at someone else's whim. No sane person would use a "Cloud" C compiler. Of course, GitHub is just a mashup of online backup and Facebook, so it doesn't matter if it breaks.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#37

Post by slantedview »

It's worth noting that even syntax highlighting on common languages like Java is currently messed up on Github. I hope it's fixed eventually, but kinda lame to take something that wasn't broken and break it.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#38

Post by walterbell »

Buge wrote: post #34
walterbell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear downvoters, have you heard of the Streisand effect? This thread now has the most downvotes (-14) of the many comments I've posted on HN. There is nothing factually incorrect in my posts. Why does this question deserve five downvotes? > Why not give existing users the choice of migration and timing? Edit: -20 downvotes. Previous record was -3.

This situation is very different from the Streisand effect. In the Streisand effect a single party is trying silence everyone else. Here everyone is trying to silence you. They are nearly opposite situations. A minority trying to silence a majority vs a majority trying to silence a minority. In both situations the majority wins.

That is true if all downvoters are independent.

Keep in mind that HN has cultural norms for downvoting, it is explicitly not for "silencing" opinions.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#39

Post by stingraycharles »

walterbell wrote: post #3
jarcane wrote: post #2

It is still difficult for me to express my opinion of this move without simply resorting to strings of profanity. Frankly, I suspect Atom has more to do with it than anything.

Why is Atom more strategically important to Github than existing developers? Is there an economic belief that Atom will reach some larger base of untapped developers who don't know how to use other editors? If a vendor cannot be trusted to host your content without regression, why would you trust that vendor to supply your mission-critical editor?

No, but the article highlights that maybe they are using Github's traction to get a better syntax highlighter for Atom. As in, instead of waiting for a large community of Atom users contribute Atom syntax highlighting, they simply push the same engine onto Github and let that community take care of the syntax highlighting they actually care bout.

If this were the case, it would be slightly evil, but very clever business-wise. But we don't know, so all this is is a small conspiracy theory.

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