Atom Shell is now Electron • Hacker News Board

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#11

Post by saurik » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #10

ars wrote: post #9

That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.

It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.

Which argues that good names are generally not a single dictionary word. This is like saying "nowadays there are no good passwords people can't guess: people can just try the entire dictionary in a few seconds". If you list major brands, the vast majority of them, even of really really old brands, are either made up words or phrases.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#12

Post by smacktoward » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:09 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #10

ars wrote: post #9

That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.

It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.

Then call it "Electron Shell," which would at least be more Googleable than "Electron" by itself is.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#13

Post by anon3_ » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

The thing that turned me away from Atom and its' development is CoffeeScript. As someone who loves idiomatic JS, I still can't get why you'd pick a language that makes tooling and debugging a nightmare. It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1].

[1] https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#14

Post by mikewhy » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #8

Is it suitable for WYSIWYG or a plain text & source code editor? Does it originate initially from Mozilla's Ace text editor? https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace The name changes are a bit confusing (Mozilla Bespin -> Skywriter -> Ace ->(?) Atom -> Electron).

Atom Shell != Atom

It is the, well, shell of the Atom editor.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#15

Post by quanticle » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #8

Is it suitable for WYSIWYG or a plain text & source code editor? Does it originate initially from Mozilla's Ace text editor? https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace The name changes are a bit confusing (Mozilla Bespin -> Skywriter -> Ace ->(?) Atom -> Electron).

So, it looks like there's a number of things you're confused about. First, Atom doesn't have anything to do with Mozilla's Ace or Bespin. Ace and Bespin (now Cloud 9) are tools that live on a server, which you access through a browser.

Atom is a completely separate project (started by Github, not Mozilla) to build a native text editor using web technologies. The text editor is a native application, but it exposes a Javascript API for plugins. After a while, Github realized that the infrastructure needed to make Atom work (e.g. installers, updates, notifications, etc.) could also be used by other projects, so that code was split off into "Atom Shell". It's this project that's getting renamed to "Electron".

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#16

Post by quanticle » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:14 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #9

That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.

It's not any more difficult to Google than "Go", or "Python". I mean, we're talking about board games and snakes, right? :)

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#17

Post by jjangsangy » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:18 PM UTC

You guys should probably release nucleus before hooli does!

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#18

Post by lnanek2 » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #10

ars wrote: post #9

That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.

It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.

So call it two words. ElectronEnv, AtomEditor, AtomIDE, etc..

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#19

Post by PetitPrince » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:31 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

usaphp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.

Then call it "Electron Shell," which would at least be more Googleable than "Electron" by itself is.

Unfortunately, an electron shell is also a widely used term in chemistry and physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#20

Post by gmac » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 8:31 PM UTC

anon3_ wrote: post #13

The thing that turned me away from Atom and its' development is CoffeeScript. As someone who loves idiomatic JS, I still can't get why you'd pick a language that makes tooling and debugging a nightmare. It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1]. [1] https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

Your comment fills me with equal parts irritation and curiosity, just because it's so far from my experience. I use CoffeeScript every day, and I experience not even the mildest of tooling or debugging hiccups. And I find CoffeeScript hits such a sweet spot — some of the best bits of Ruby and Python syntax, with the first class functions and raw speed of JavaScript. Mozilla's source maps implementation is pure JS, so you can take that anywhere (e.g. I use it with JavaScriptCore on iOS). Can you elaborate on these nightmares?