Atom founder talks about making Atom's spiritual successor, Zed: https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s
GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year
On December 15, Microsoft's GitHub plans to turn out the lights on Atom, its open-source text editor that has inspired and influenced widely used commercial apps, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and GitHub Desktop. The social code biz said it's doing so to focus on cloud-based software. "While that goal of …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 8th June 2022 20:48 GMT oiseau
S. Sharwood in 2018
Hello:
This article was written by Simon Sharwood back in 2018.
I then commented on another commentard's comment:
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“We want to wait for the dust to settle and better understand what Microsoft’s plans are for GitHub."
I see ...
To better understand what Microsoft’s plans are.
Really now ...
Is it possible that at this stage of the IT game (2018) you actually need to wait for anything to better understand Microshaft's plans?
I believe this phrase applies, improve by using "ignore" in lieu of "don't know" :
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
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As you can see, four years later things seem to be right on track for MS.
In the meantime, everyone else has their thumb up their ass.
O.
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Thursday 9th June 2022 03:49 GMT amanfromMars 1
GOD Works in Mysterious Ways for/at/with Microsoft
Once you drag and drop services and applications and development into Cloud Territory, Embrace, Extend and Exploit Exponentially becomes the favourite default choice option of an Almighty Few with raised unauthorised privileged access to Principal Primary Atomic and Super Sub Atomic Programming Launch CodeXSSXXXX Secrets ..... Foundational Knowledge .
A necessary progressive move not dissimilar to a quantum leap fraught with dangers that tempt and taunt evil intent and content. Take care and beware to not invite, by virtue of one’s own decidedly unpleasant activities, the undivided attention of the Guardians of Opened Perly Gates and Special Operational Force Personnel/Advanced IntelAIgents.
* Global Operating Devices/Virtual Machinery
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Thursday 9th June 2022 06:46 GMT Joe W
Re: VSCode is great but...
Why on Earth is there a fsck'ing "short"-cut with another fsck'ing additional key to do the simpler stuff? And why on Earth and in $(Deity)'s name are those shortcuts no longer shown in context menues (like in Word for Windows of old, or Excel, ca. 1995-ish)? Makes it really hard to figure those out, especially if some brain dead... a..... decides they are locale dependent, some of us work in different countries, in international environments, and this just plays havoc wiht muscle memory. (and don't get me started on translating Excel formula expressions...)
I never want to copy any formatting between documents / instances / windows! Either I am working on code, which has no font formatting or markup or whatever, or I am working on a text document which has its own formatting, and thank you very much, I wnat the document to have a coherent layout (yeah, my company insists on using Word, so that's hit and miss - still: templates, I use them for a reason), and I do not want to take the formatting from another document / email / website / whatever and put it into the document, because I want the fomratting to be the same for all text.
I'll.... grab my coat, sorry for the rant, but this has been bothering me for the last four years. Before that I was using LaTeX to write lengthy documents, and vim for writing code, and Linux did not copy any formatting acrioss documents / programs. Windows does, which sucks.
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Wednesday 8th June 2022 22:50 GMT emfiliane
Why would this matter?
You make it sound like it will suddenly *shut off*, instead of existing as-is forever. It's already in the same state, it just hasn't been officially deemed over yet. This is the normal life-cycle of Open Source: It reaches a point where it's feature complete, and it no longer needs to be continually updated. In fact, most existing users tend to react negatively if too many innovations are introduced. It certainly doesn't need to be reskinned every time Windows is. I'm sure people (perhaps the current maintainers) will keep contributing minor security fixes if necessary.
This isn't a cloud platform. You can't just *shut off* the Atom editor. It will just keep working as is until the platforms it runs on cease existing, by which time someone will have either forked it or replaced it.
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Wednesday 8th June 2022 23:09 GMT Doctor Syntax
"According to GitHub, the project hasn't had significant feature development for several years, apart from maintenance and security updates"
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Vi (the real vi, not vim) has been in that state for decades, not years. It means nobody's going round breaking it.
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Thursday 9th June 2022 06:42 GMT Sgt_Oddball
That could be...
A result of vi itself though since that would mean closing that one terminal you can't close to update it...
(yes, I know its perfectly functional when you learn the arcane key combinations to be able edit and close but it irks me having to look up how to close it everytime because I can never which bloody key to press to allow it listen to furious mashing of the 'q' key)
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Thursday 9th June 2022 10:33 GMT Greybearded old scrote
Re: That could be...
Which is why I point and laugh (when not ranting) at the 'Dark Cave' UI pattern. You're welcome to endure it if that's what you like but vi/vim/neovim apologists need to do some studying.
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Saturday 11th June 2022 09:57 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: That could be...
Vi needs no apology. It is a tool to do a job very efficiently. No faffing with WIMP. As with any tool, you learn to use it so it becomes second nature and then the only criterion is how little effort, in this case keys pressed, goes into the tool's operation compared to what goes into the work. There was discussion above about short cuts which an experienced user relies on. The entire vi UI is of the same nature as those short cuts
Over 35 years ago I was in a user organisation and we had one of the early Unix ports to different H/W - Z8000 The tape with vi on it hadn't been included but we had a different editor, (The Rand editor; whatever happened to that?) Experience with that saw me translated into the world of IT for the 2nd half of my career and into London
First day at the new job with a more regular Unix system. No Rand editor available, use vi. That day I worked round a vague memory of what I'd read of vi, headed straight for Dillons after work and bought a book on it. I quickly got enough out of the book to get by and picked up other bits as I needed them. That book is still on my shelves somewhere and is as relevant to its subject as it was back then; so is what I learned from it and which has become second nature.
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Thursday 9th June 2022 14:40 GMT Roland6
Well given the basic editor functions haven't changed, the lack of "significant feature development" is to be expected.
However, having recently looked at the MS SwiftKey website, I see significant feature includes such things as the ability to add your own wallpaper...
This concept of "significant feature" goes a long way to explaining why MS have been doing what they have with Windows since they started developing Windows 8.
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Thursday 9th June 2022 08:22 GMT Mishak
I used to use it
It was cross-platform, which made things easier for me as I work on Mac, Windows and Linux.
However, I also work with some very large files (MB size xml), and the performance (especially regex searching) was unacceptable - though that was a few years ago now, and may well have been fixed.
Was great for "regular" code editing though, and a decent alternative for non-Windows development.
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Thursday 9th June 2022 08:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Extinguish" implies that it's going away. Atom is not going anywhere, it's just not going to be maintained by GitHub anymore. I could see that being a bit disappointing if Atom had been getting huge feature updates previously, but it hasn't been. Someone will make a fork that continues to provide minor updates as necessary and not much will change for Atom users (other than maybe the name).
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Thursday 9th June 2022 08:52 GMT Andy The Hat
"... the potential recurring revenue, vendor lock-in, and information gathering enabled by cloud-based apps."
Ooh, cynicism is alive and kicking. I believe the cloud licence model is for the custors benefit and nothing at all to do with draconian usage control and profit. What is in this glass ...?
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Thursday 9th June 2022 14:43 GMT Roland6
Re: Know what?
>The article says that community contributions have dropped to nothing.
Not really, its a mature development, which clearly does what it says on the tin.
Is there a stack of really useful essential feature updates/bug fixes that have been outstanding for 3+ years and the project maintainer posting a comment that they don't have time and if anyone wants to step forward...? That is a sign of abandonware.
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Friday 10th June 2022 15:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Atom was always a little bit shit. The do-everything-in-Electron idea has been influential and successful, but Atom honestly never did it particularly well. It got stuck in the no-man's-land of being way too heavyweight to be just a text editor but not capable enough to go toe-to-toe with real IDEs. Given both it and the infinitely more popular/capable (and MIT-licensed) VSCode are both ultimately owned by Microsoft this makes a tonne of sense.
It was an idea of its time but I doubt it'll be all that much missed.
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Monday 13th June 2022 12:47 GMT Soham1087
Call by Value and Call by Reference in C
I'm trying to understand the conceptual difference between call by reference, value, and name.
So I have the following pseudocode:
foo(a, b, c)
{
b =b++;
a = a++;
c = a + b*10
}
X=1;
Y=2;
Z=3;
foo(X, Y+2, Z);
What's X, Y, and Z after the foo call if a, b, and c are all call by reference? if a, b, and c are call-by-value/result? if a, b, and c are call-by-name?
Another scenario:
X=1;
Y=2;
Z=3;
foo(X, Y+2, X);
I'm trying to get a head start on studying for an upcoming final and this seemed like a good review problem to go over. Pass-by-name is definitely the most foreign to me.
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Tuesday 28th June 2022 15:19 GMT Dreadedhill
Lifecycle of Open Source, not cheap shots
Atom is an open-source project no longer in active development. The focus has moved elsewhere. Everyone else has lost interest, so we cannot fault Microsoft.
If there were community interest, then Atom would continue without Microsoft. Have you contributed to Atom? Know anyone who has? (Actually, just check the commit logs.) Before you take cheap shots at Microsoft, look in the mirror. That is the nature of Open Source. If there is interest, then anyone can fork the Atom repository and continue development. The fork might happen, but I expect interest will be minimal.
Electron is another story. Makes a lot of sense to me. Expect this to continue to be of interest to the community.