It must be tough to see how quickly the community turns on you when something better (in some ways) comes around.
Atom clearly offered something that struck a chord when it initially appeared. I remember having an idea, and implementing it as a plugin, all within a lazy Sunday afternoon. This allowed the ecosystem to flourish, and new ideas being extremely easy to at least prototype.
It also allowed unprecedented[0] access to almost everything.
The latter turned out to be somewhat of a curse, unfortunately. Because the wide-ranging access allowed extension authors, and their users, to shoot themselves in the foot: It often lead to performance degradation, instability, murky UIs etc. Such troubles would usually be attributed to Atom itself. This was the groundwork for the narrative to almost instantly flip when VSCode appeared.
VSCode itself took the lessons from Atom, which must make it even more painful to now see it glorified vis-a-vis Atom: Extensions have to work through tightly defined protocols, and are never run on the main threat. This works well to avoid performance issues and to keep the UI from disintegrating. But it is also a severe limitation on the freedom to experiment, which is why that extension I once tried my hand on could not possibly be build in VSCode (it renders block comments written in Markdown as HTML right in the source code, including images, diagrams, links etc.)
[0]: Yeah, I'm sure there's some other editor that did it before. But somehow Atom got it right with Javascript as the language, and maybe the UI and documentation steering people to actually try it.
Microsoft has a ton of experience with misbehaving third party developers. Distrust of code written by others is by now a second nature to them. I am sure that they would have gotten this right even without Atom falling into the "open internals" trap first.
Which, to be fair is understandable on Microsoft's part. Blindly trusting others to create in your ecosystem while novel, is a _very_ scary place to be if you are the one who has to answer to the shortcomings of the platform
>It must be tough to see how quickly the community turns on you when something better (in some ways) comes around.
I agree, and i want to like atom. I love the motivation and i love how they have moved the "friendlier than VIM but not quite an IDE" market forward, because that's exactly the sort of editor I want.
but ultimately i'm trying to do a job, and that job is a lot easier when i'm not waiting for a text editor to catch up to my keystrokes. Even if it is some plugin's fault and not actually Atom's fault that the editor is slow, I don't have time to troubleshoot that when other editors don't let plugins screw up the editor.
Atom clearly offered something that struck a chord when it initially appeared. I remember having an idea, and implementing it as a plugin, all within a lazy Sunday afternoon. This allowed the ecosystem to flourish, and new ideas being extremely easy to at least prototype.
It also allowed unprecedented[0] access to almost everything.
The latter turned out to be somewhat of a curse, unfortunately. Because the wide-ranging access allowed extension authors, and their users, to shoot themselves in the foot: It often lead to performance degradation, instability, murky UIs etc. Such troubles would usually be attributed to Atom itself. This was the groundwork for the narrative to almost instantly flip when VSCode appeared.
VSCode itself took the lessons from Atom, which must make it even more painful to now see it glorified vis-a-vis Atom: Extensions have to work through tightly defined protocols, and are never run on the main threat. This works well to avoid performance issues and to keep the UI from disintegrating. But it is also a severe limitation on the freedom to experiment, which is why that extension I once tried my hand on could not possibly be build in VSCode (it renders block comments written in Markdown as HTML right in the source code, including images, diagrams, links etc.)
[0]: Yeah, I'm sure there's some other editor that did it before. But somehow Atom got it right with Javascript as the language, and maybe the UI and documentation steering people to actually try it.