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Atom Shell is now Electron

blog.atom.io

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#21
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

You actually don't have to touch coffeescript to develop for Atom or Electron.

EDIT: here's a demo app with zero CoffeeScript: https://github.com/thom-nic/electron-demo

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#22
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

That's like saying you won't use Rails because it's written in Ruby and not C.

Also, it's nice to work in a language that has the right features and not just all the features. I like CoffeeScript as much for what it doesn't have as for what it does have. I recently saw this piece of code:

    new Array(26)
      .map(function (item, index) {
        return String.fromCharCode(65 + index);
    })
as a "heads up" for map lovers. That's the kind of code that people write when they're tacking the latest new feature onto someplace that it doesn't belong. This code isn't just semantically wrong, it's stylistically wrong. Having a less schizophrenic language helps jr guys avoid code like the above.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#23
post #2

What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?

Both are Chromium.

Node Webkit has a forked version of Chromium Source with modifications (removed the event handler and replace with NodeJS one and a bunch of others). Seen at https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src

Electron uses the Content framework and has no modifications to Chromium. Directly calling the required parts from the source (example https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/ch...).

That is the major difference, in regards to architecture. Basically in Atom you need to create the Window, and in NodeWebkit you always have a Window and you need to do stuff to that Window.

The other ones include things like backers, NodeWebkit is backed mostly by Intel, as one of their developers is who is building it. Atom is backed by Github bunch of others.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#25
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

That's like saying you won't use Rails because it's written in Ruby and not C. Also, it's nice to work in a language that has the right features and not just all the features. I like CoffeeScript as much for what it doesn't have as for what it does have. I recently saw this piece of code: new Array(26) .map(function (item, index) { return String.fromCharCode(65 + index); }) as a "heads up" for map lovers. That's the…

    const caps = new Array(26).map((item, index) => String.fromCharCode(65 + index));
It's not wrong. Could maybe be better though.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#26
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

To all the sibling commenters defending the merits of CoffeeScript:

- https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-coffeescript/131

- https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-it-better-for-discourse-to-u...

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#27
post #2

What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?

Here's a Stack Overflow answer to that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-e...

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#28
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

That 'idiomatic' JS is but a mere illusion perpetuated by a VM written in C++. We can do this all day.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#29
post #10
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.

"Google" was a good name...

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#30
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

Idiomatic JavaScript is terrible to read. I'm not one for metalanguages but I'd be hard pressed to argue against it in this case.
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