Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Atom was archived today

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 614 posts

Re: Atom was archived today

#161

Post by smaudet »

jgilias wrote: post #152
p-e-w wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.

Great point. I think the OP would be amazed if you showed them how a car works...

Re: Atom was archived today

#162

Post by lastdong »

p-e-w wrote: post #75
esprehn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins. That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up…

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

VS Code built on top of Atom’s team great work, which was open source (something that Microsoft was still grasping at the time). Not saying VS Code isn’t great, but they definitely learned from past projects mistakes and wins. Atom was one of the pioneers.

Re: Atom was archived today

#163

Post by IshKebab »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #125
rodw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone believes Electron "sucks" because it's mainly the apps that suck that are noticeably built with Electron. It's the "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofkquwmT40&t=29s >

Sorry but the very good Electron app which actually is very good, VSCode, really does suck if you maintain 10 projects. That’s not a lot of projects. It’s just a lot of browser tabs multiplied by documentation in an actual browser.

I agree you have to keep the number of VSCode windows quite low (5 is ok, 10 will make it struggle) but in fairness how many times have you had 10 instances of Visual Studio or IntelliJ running? I've never got close to that.

Re: Atom was archived today

#164

Post by forgotpwd16 »

jgilias wrote: post #152
p-e-w wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.

Based on last sentence, software engineering is probably implied.

edit: Seems it was not.

Re: Atom was archived today

#165

Post by nelblu »

kajaktum wrote: post #146

Can someone tell me why OSes can't do what browsers do? It seems to me that browsers are the OS of today so why not just skip the middleman and make it first class? It seems to be a layer that exists solely because the 3 competing OSes is incompatible and browsers just happen to be compatible (for how long?).

Not everyone prefers browsers, especially these days when they are consolidating into one engine. Especially with text editors where you will be dealing with local files, a browser based editor won't work well.

Re: Atom was archived today

#166

Post by jgilias »

smaudet wrote: post #161
jgilias wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.

Great point. I think the OP would be amazed if you showed them how a car works...

I’m sure they have an understanding of how a car works, and also, that they actually meant “software engineering”.

Re: Atom was archived today

#167

Post by smaudet »

rob74 wrote: post #37
p-e-w wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.

Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser ve…

Teams holds the crown as far as terrible electron apps.

I actually can't run it locally (absurd tech policies), and I am so glad to never run it at all ever. Just easier to load it into an isolated browser tab when I need it, Zoom is so superior it's not even funny...

Re: Atom was archived today

#168

Post by Sad90sNerd »

fastball wrote: post #149
Sad90sNerd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it was (and is ) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...

You can compile web tech to V8 bytecode and run it in Electron – how do you feel about compiled programs now?

THERE IS NO GOD. I only program in Ada to keep my sanity 0.0

Re: Atom was archived today

#169

Post by Qwertious »

tikhonj wrote: post #34
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what value is that, over the website?

Two big ones I can think of: 1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough 2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access

>1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage

That sounds suspiciously like "properly adheres to the native OS's conventions", the lack of which is the #1 criticism of electron.

Re: Atom was archived today

#170

Post by p-e-w »

jgilias wrote: post #152
p-e-w wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn. VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with wh…

> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.

I hold VSCode to be at least equal to those achievements. Having used dozens of text editors and IDEs in the course of my programming career, I can appreciate how non-obvious it is for a piece of software this complex to work so fucking well all the time.

And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that of most of the projects you listed. VSCode has probably saved hundreds of millions of hours for programmers over the past few years. It's almost impossible to come up with an appropriate comparison for how important it is.

Post reply on HN