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Atom 1.0

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Re: Atom 1.0

#201

Post by mikeryan »

steego wrote: post #124
jerf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Cycle of Bloat. 1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo! 2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo! 3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because the original product wasn't big enough.) 4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well, here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the base…

I disagree with your characterization. Take jQuery for example. 1. Small, fast and minimal. 2. Easy to create plugins. 3. Budding ecosystem and explosion of plugins. 4. Conflicts ensued and some plugins got pulled into the core project. Eventually, the growth of jQuery tapered off as the project stabilized. Not only did the size taper off, it got smaller as well. After nearly 10 years, we're talking about a payload o…

Jquery is a lot of things but minimal isn't really accurate.

Combining a DOM manipulation library with an AJAX library and a Promises/Deferred library is and has been a pain point for me.

Also some of those size reductions have been at the cost of features (in particular by reducing the target browser set)

Its a great project. I use it a lot but I'm not sure its a counterpoint to bloat.

Re: Atom 1.0

#203

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

abritishguy wrote: post #68
Mahn wrote: post #56

I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

Nothing stops you using javascript in your own packages

And by "nothing" you mean the entire UI library

I quote:

> The UI library is in coffee script; if you want use a UI for your plugin, youre pretty much stuck using it.

> (..and yes, its technically possible to do with plain js, but I challenge any of the 'but just use js' folk to link to a popular plugin, with a UI, that does)

Re: Atom 1.0

#204

Post by danneu »

jflatow wrote: post #161
omouse wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to what I've felt with Emacs since I first used it. Might be time to work on some tutorials and examples to make Emacs easier to hack on and contribute to...

Yes. I keep trying to like Atom because I want to have native WebView buffers while I'm editing. Every time I try it, I end up wondering how anyone can be comfortable using it. I'm not sure how much of that is due to instability that will be fixed over time, and how much is because I'm coming from Emacs. Have any experienced Emacs users found that Atom makes them more productive in any dimension? I want to like it bu…

My custom Emacs init file that's grown over the years reminds me of my main problem with Emacs: to do anything, it just feels like a bunch of magical incantations using global variables and function calls I wouldn't know how to discover on my own.

Random example from my user.el file:

    (set-cursor-color "White")
    (setq blink-cursor-interval 0.5)
With some trial and error, I could find out if `(setq cursor-color "White")` works. Or see if `set-blink-cursor-interval` exists. Or look up why `set-cursor-color` exists in the first place when surely it's more consistent to just modify a config variable. Or find some best Emacslisp practices online. Or figure out why I could never get working my one attempt to write a custom function to scratch my own itch.

But I just can't be bothered anymore.

Seems like Atom is having an easy time beating Emacs on this front, and I'll probably switch over for good the next time something breaks in my .emacs.d folder.

Re: Atom 1.0

#206

Post by baby »

Mahn wrote: post #56

I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.

CoffeeScript is actually pretty cool, from a few minutes spent with it it was just syntaxic sugar for js. Why don't you like it?

Re: Atom 1.0

#207

Post by serve_yay »

schneidmaster wrote: post #183
WaxProlix wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to use!" What? I don't get the value proposition.

The primary purpose was to make it easily hackable - since the whole thing is JS (actually CoffeeScript) and webviews, creating views and stuff is as easy as making a website. That said, I think I care more about performance. Sublime Text is just unbelievably rock solid.

Same here. And writing extensions in JS is a compelling feature... I just don't see why that should mean the whole thing is done with web technologies.
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