Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less co…
> Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. Almost every junior I hire has only used Atom, Sublime or VS Code, especially JavaScript developers. >VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less common languages and features. The reason to swi…
Sunsetting Atom
201–210 of 880 posts
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#202“Sunsetting” an open source project seems… unfitting? Hand it off to the community, look for new maintainers, donate it to the Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects, sure. But saying that you’ve decided to “sunset” or “archive” it, telling users to plan for their migration, seems counter to the notion that open source software forms part of a commons - something that Github, of all companies, should understand.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here.
Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing.
Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development.
However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
So MS owns the default place where code is hosted, and the default tool people use to edit code. Neat.
It's kind of bad, but they're probably the least bad behemoth owner. Apple would try to switch everything towards their walked garden, no questions asked. Google would shut stuff down every two years. Oracle... I'm not even going to bother. Amazon and Facebook could be interesting. Facebook is a bit shady, see the Oculus Facebook account debacle, but they're decent as stewards of dev tools. Amazon is also quite relia…
Facebook/meta seems horrifying. Some of their tools are indeed great, but I can just imagine having to use a facebook login to push code to GitHub or to download VSCode plugins.
Amazon is problematic for similar reasons as MS: since they are one of the biggest application hosts out there, bad incentives exist in terms of potentially allowing biases in their tooling to preference their own platform.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#204Called this ~4 years ago when they were acquired by M$. But it's still really sad to see. I use it because it was trivial to CSS style it to match my Desktop. It's comfortable to me in a way that other editors thus far have not been. Are there other editors with this level of customizability? I know VSCode and Sublime support theming but from what I can tell it involves installing pre-packaged themes.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#205It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.
Does anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#206It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.
Does anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree in principle, but I find it hard to imagine that there's enough interest to find someone who is willing to maintain the software and the package registry. Speaking of packages - of the six featured packages I get offered on atom.io, only one had a release in the last two years, and half have been unchanged for half a decade. Atom's already dead.
A lack of releases could mean dead, but it could also mean finished . As in, complete: not in need of more features, and having no bugs of sufficient severity to bother fixing. Finished is a state more software should aspire to reach. Sadly, with the advent of connectivity in everything, it's getting rare for even firmware to be finished.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably under a new name - I’d expect MS to be in control of the “Atom” trademark and branding, and they would stop further use.
if you attempt to sell, or commercially utilize the atom name in a fork of the project, i can see why microsoft would stop you.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.
Re: Sunsetting Atom
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like brackets but always ends up in VSCode due to extensions.
It's a very dumb reason to stick with an editor, but I have trouble going back to Sublime after VSCode despite preferring most things about Sublime, because I always forget how to manage packages using Sublime's command prompt and have to screw around with it for a while each time, while VSCode has a GUI for that so the memorization required is zero, and can easily browse available packages without bouncing out to a…
The entire editor being easily tweakble is the killer feature of web-tech based editors.
Sublime may have opened up more customizability since then...
It's amazing how much a minor annoyance can drive someone to a completely different solution.