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Atom Shell is now Electron

blog.atom.io

41–50 of 84 posts

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#41
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.

No need to use words from dictionary then. '999fkk9' is usable and googlable as any other arbitrary name.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#42
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.

I had assumed this was something to do with Acorn Computers [1] whose first models were called Atom [2] and Electron [3]. Frankly I was disappointed I was looking forward to how someone could have combined these pieces of British computing history with some kind of modern shell.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#43
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

I'm developing an app using Atom/Electron and I'm pretty sure you don't need to use CoffeeScript at all. It's Node.js and a browser.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: "more people know JavaScript than CoffeeScript, so you shouldn't bother with CoffeeScript" More people are familiar with Notepad than vi. Does that make vi a bad choice?

> More people are familiar with Notepad than vi. Does that make vi a bad choice? That analogy doesn't work, because editors don't have network effects, whereas programming languages do.

> editors don't have network effects

The 82 plugins in my current vim setup really, really beg to differ.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#45
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

> It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1].

irony alert: Brendan Eich has said publicly that CoffeeScript was the impetus for several of the features that made it into ES-6, like fat arrows.

Without CoffeeScript, lots of people wouldn’t have known that they wanted some of the things that are in ES-6.

As it is, you don’t need CoffeeScript to develop for Atom. Which is part of the beauty of CoffeeScript. It’s interoperable with what you’re doing today.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is wrong. "new Array(26)" creates an Array with preallocated space for 26 elements (instead of 26 'undefined' elements, as one might expect), and calling .map() on it will return another empty array. The semantics here are particularly difficult to reason about because map is specified to not execute its callback on undefined elements. Someone will probably chime in here with a correction, but the point is this --…

Actually this code is very stupid and you're half correct. The standard built in Array methods like map or forEach don't work on implicitly defined undefined values but on explicit one they do.

For example: [1,2,3,undefined].forEach(ele => console.log(ele)) > 1 > 2 > 3 > undefined On the other hand: [1,2,3,,].forEach(ele => console.log(ele)) > 1 > 2 > 3

So, take the time you dedicate to hating JavaScript to understand the language instead of bitching here you and that stupid jerk above.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#48
post #5

Im curious about the name change. What do they stand to gain from losing all of the history of atom shell search results?

It would still be easy to find the project via google. Just googling "atom-shell" will probably get you this article, and from there a user would figure out that it's been renamed.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#49
I'm glad to see Electron / Atom-Shell moving forwards, but I wish they'd publish a roadmap. There are things (like copy/paste) that are lacking and I'd like to know what the plans are. As it stands it's mostly a wait-and-see kind of deal, which is a bit disconcerting on big projects.

Re: Atom Shell is now Electron

#50
post #11
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.

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.

The difference is that branding is important. Ease of learning and remembering a name.

Very different to passwords, which should be computer-generated and computer-stored, you should never know your passwords.

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