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GitHub dropped Pygments

greghendershott.com

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Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#91

Post by greghendershott »

abhinavg wrote: post #11

I honestly don't see a problem here. They decided to change a backend library for a non-essential system in their product. Most services don't ask for permission or make announcements when they make changes like this. The approach seemed to be, if things break, people will report it and we’ll fix it. While this may not be the best approach, the number of languages supported is too high for a person to check each one…

I didn't expect my blog post to be on the front page of HN. Here's a TL;DR summary:

For many languages this is a significant and distracting degradation in the presentation.

I could understand GitHub removing highlighting completely because they feel speed is the overriding priority. That would be even faster than what they're doing now. Languages would look "plain" instead of "wrong". Not my first choice, but a reasonable choice.

The situation now is that they've replaced a library that had been handling highlighting thoroughly, with a variety of text-editor lexers that mostly are not. People like me who already contributed to Pygments, aren't feeling motivated to do this all over again for no good reason. So it seems likely the lexers will remain poor for quite a long time. Which is unfortunate.

Finally, at the time I wrote my blog post, I was speculating about the motivation because GitHub hadn't explained why, yet. Someone later did explain ("because speed") in the issue thread.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#92

Post by regularfry »

muyuu wrote: post #73
abhinavg wrote: post #11

I honestly don't see a problem here. They decided to change a backend library for a non-essential system in their product. Most services don't ask for permission or make announcements when they make changes like this. The approach seemed to be, if things break, people will report it and we’ll fix it. While this may not be the best approach, the number of languages supported is too high for a person to check each one…

Also, not a great idea to rely on some "cloud" 3rd party service to host your portfolio IMO - at least not exclusively. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. That said, I don't think anyone will bin a candidate because Github didn't highlight his or her code properly.

It's not that people necessarily choose to host portfolios on github, but more that employers will treat whatever's on there under your name as a portfolio regardless.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#93

Post by JohnTHaller »

Twirrim wrote: post #52
isomorphic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a giant single point of failure. Others would rush to fill the vacuum, but it'd be a brutal few months (years) while we all relied upon Bing. Is there any GitHub-esque outfit waiting in the wings that provides free OSS hosting?

https://bitbucket.org/ https://www.codebasehq.com/ https://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ I must admit, I rather like bitbucket, you can get free private repositories with them too.

There's also SourceForge, which hosts SVN, Git, Hg, etc and is the largest host of FLOSS applications (Git is the largest host of FLOSS components and web code).

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#94

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

DanBC wrote: post #46
walterbell wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> HN has cultural norms for downvoting Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines and they only exist within a subset of the users of the site. I don't know why you were downvoted so heavily! I would have thought that a few downvotes would have been enough.

"Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines "

Cultural norms usually aren't, that's why they're culture.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#95

Post by joemaller1 »

cremno wrote: post #6
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.)

Your assumption is correct. The blog post links to an issue in which an official statement (and a graph) can be found: https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/1717#issuecomment-... >By using TextMate grammars we also get some nice features like highlighting SQL inside Ruby heredocs. But the main motivation was improving performance.

Most important link in this thread.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#96

Post by mcphage »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #93
Twirrim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bitbucket.org/ https://www.codebasehq.com/ https://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ I must admit, I rather like bitbucket, you can get free private repositories with them too.

There's also SourceForge, which hosts SVN, Git, Hg, etc and is the largest host of FLOSS applications (Git is the largest host of FLOSS components and web code).

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but SourceForge used to have an approval process to get a new project / repo set up, which defeats a lot of the utility of GitHub for being able to store whatever projects you want to toss up there.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#97

Post by Macha »

lmm wrote: post #89
Macha wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W3C at least has this.

How did CSS 2 with its zero implementations ever happen then?

CSS 2 predates the rule.

The initial drafts of CSS 2.1 on the other hand, were published in 2002, yet it was 2011 by the time it became a full reccomendation despite having been in use for a long period by that stage. CSS3 colors (i.e. rgba() etc.) also became a full recommendation on the same day.

> Two months earlier, in March of 1998, CSS 2 had become a W3C Proposed Recommendation (PR) which meant that it was considered "done" and was simply awaiting a procedural W3C member review and vote. For all practical purposes, nothing else was going to get fixed in CSS 2. There wasn't a Candidate Recommendation (CR) phase back then, as evidence by the fact that no-one (including my Tasman team as part of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh) was able to implement CSS 2 as specified. The problems in CSS 2 were far more severe than mere errata - we had to develop a full revision to fix it.

http://tantek.com/2011/160/b1/css-2-1-css3-w3c-open-web-stan...

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#98

Post by resetti »

Argorak wrote: post #79
tomcorrigan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect people to hold you on that promise What promise did github make?

The promise any service makes. To solve my problems and to work _as a service_ for me.

That's neither how promises nor the laws around them work. GitHub owes you nothing except what was explicitly spelled out when you signed up.

Half the difficulty of running a business comes from customers with a sense of entitlement not understanding this.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#99

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

"""pygments.rb had an interesting history of trying to use a Python library in Ruby on a high-traffic web site. They had tried various approaches. The final approach — piping to a long-running Python process — seemed to work well. """

That doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence in this thing.

Re: GitHub dropped Pygments

#100

Post by res0nat0r »

greghendershott wrote: post #91
abhinavg wrote: post #11

I honestly don't see a problem here. They decided to change a backend library for a non-essential system in their product. Most services don't ask for permission or make announcements when they make changes like this. The approach seemed to be, if things break, people will report it and we’ll fix it. While this may not be the best approach, the number of languages supported is too high for a person to check each one…

I didn't expect my blog post to be on the front page of HN. Here's a TL;DR summary: For many languages this is a significant and distracting degradation in the presentation. I could understand GitHub removing highlighting completely because they feel speed is the overriding priority. That would be even faster than what they're doing now. Languages would look "plain" instead of "wrong". Not my first choice, but a reas…

Are the majority of languages now broken, or just a small niche subset that don't see much use vs. ruby, python, etc?

If a few minor languages hardly anyone uses as compared to the whole site might need some fixing, this still seems like a win from Github's side of things since per the graph the change did in fact significantly improve render times.

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