211–220 of 459 posts
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?
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The parent did not say that plugins caused bloat, instead that resolving common problems with plugins (stability, quality, conflicts etc.) by pulling them into core is what causes bloat (slowness, complexity etc.) and that trying to resolve the tension between flaky plug-in based systems and bloated monolithic systems is cyclical.
Still: is anyone complaining of Emacs or Vim or ST3 being slow/complex because they have installed plugins to the core? What's an example in the wild of this "cycle of bloat" in which people complain about it?
Emacs? Yes. Absolutely. Emacs once stood, humorously, for “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”. That is a valid complaint that people have made.
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Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor (or whatever else) "bloated and slow"? First, whatever you don't use, it's not even loaded in memory. Second, bloated is all about having tons of options you don't need or use. Not about adding stuff you DO need piecemeal. Third, bloat is mostly a UI thing, not a "number of add-ons" or "too many lines of code" thing. Programs don't get slow…
"Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor (or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?" ... no? Hate to dismiss your entire message that way (I mean that seriously), but... People appear to be assuming a great deal more universality than I could possibly have implied, since I don't believe it's a universal problem anyhow, and never addressed scope. It's just a cycle that definitely exist…
For example I use vim, and when I tried Atom I threw on two Haskel add-ons and my system was unusable. Then I removed the add ons and my 7 year old desktop on OpenSUSE just lagged away. I than went to my other old desktop all in one and that lagged away just at typing (This was a month ago) and adding anything to Atom slowed down so much that typing was lagging let alone any feature.
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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…
See also: "minimalist web browser" and the history of Firefox :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
My all time favorite reply about bloat: "X is big because your needs are big" (in the article X = Mozilla).
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See also: "minimalist web browser" and the history of Firefox :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
Try: the web itself. The amount you need to be able to do to just load a basically-plaintext webpage now is absurd .
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Well, I know for sure I've witnessed people say #6 about the Linux Kernel and Rails multiple times. So for what it's worth, I'm very unconvinced that "bloat" is the automatically-bad thing that whoever is saying #6 says it is. There are things that are just crappy amalgamations of whatever, sure, but there are also a lot of big things that solve hard problems, and part of the implication of the cycle is that every ti…
> And it turns out that "text editing" looks really simple, and gets really not simple really fast. Text editing is really simple. The problem is that plain text editors are mostly only used by coders. (Non-coders who want to write text use Word.) And coders want features like syntax coloring, autocompletion, split views, multi-file management, etc. Features that would be of no use to someone writing a quick email or…
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Well, I know for sure I've witnessed people say #6 about the Linux Kernel and Rails multiple times. So for what it's worth, I'm very unconvinced that "bloat" is the automatically-bad thing that whoever is saying #6 says it is. There are things that are just crappy amalgamations of whatever, sure, but there are also a lot of big things that solve hard problems, and part of the implication of the cycle is that every ti…
> And it turns out that "text editing" looks really simple, and gets really not simple really fast. Text editing is really simple. The problem is that plain text editors are mostly only used by coders. (Non-coders who want to write text use Word.) And coders want features like syntax coloring, autocompletion, split views, multi-file management, etc. Features that would be of no use to someone writing a quick email or…
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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…
Don't think so. Atom is still a toy compared to Emacs (but awesome compared to almost everything else except for Vim).
However, it has enormous potential and, given enough momentum, could reach parity with Emacs.
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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...
The ease of installing packages in Emacs has improved hugely in the last few years, so I think it's getting better for beginners already.
For example: http://tullo.ch/articles/modern-emacs-setup/