What did they get out of that decision anyway? There was a moment in the blurb film where the narrator says, "Atom is based on JavaScript - so it's easy to use!"
The primary purpose was to make it easily hackable - since the whole thing is JS (actually CoffeeScript) and webviews, creating views and stuff is as easy as making a website.
That said, I think I care more about performance. Sublime Text is just unbelievably rock solid.
Honest question, what is wrong with the DOM? I'm a self trained web developer so I don't really know anything else and I'd be interested to hear what the better philosophy is.
Manipulating it is very slow, because of the way it is designed. It is not intended for building dynamic GUIs, it's for laying out text high quality text, once, on pageload. This is the other problem, the box model (even flexbox) is just not suited for designing GUIs.
So few websites are pure text these days, you inevitably end up needing loads of GUI widgets and the DOM is simply not suitable for laying them out in a sensible way. It takes ages, and css layout 'rules' are so hard to predict. You shouldn't have to be a guru to just put some fucking boxes in a row.
Try building a desktop app using any mature constraint-based layout system, and you'll see what I mean.
As you can see, pretty much every css framework is actually a hacky attempt to replicate a GUI layout pattern from 20 years ago, and you have to turn backflips in order to convince the DOM to do it performantly.
Same here. And writing extensions in JS is a compelling feature... I just don't see why that should mean the whole thing is done with web technologies.
What? I don't get the value proposition.