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Comment by hobofan

8 years ago

> I hope they don't discontinue Atom

Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...

29 comments

hobofan

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Iv  8 years ago

Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it.

https://github.com/atom/atom

  • emilsedgh  8 years ago

    In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.

    RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.

    (One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)

    • undseg  8 years ago

      That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence). Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.

    • Iv  8 years ago

      I agree but I think Github and Atom are special cases.

      A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.

  • bengotow  8 years ago

    Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.

    • ryanplant-au  8 years ago

      I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.

    • giancarlostoro  8 years ago

      They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.

    • tbrock  8 years ago

      Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).

      1 reply →

    • kourzanov  8 years ago

      sad. Atom has much better usable UI. I get constantly lost in VSCode menu and (strange enough) it is very difficult to startup a browser in it.

nielsbot  8 years ago

I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)