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by nexuist 1714 days ago
Serious question: Why does Atom still exist? On the front page they advertise something called "Atom Teletype" which seems like a ripoff of VS Live Share (or was it the other way around?)

Why aren't the Atom people working on VSC instead?
2 comments
Macha 1714 days ago
> Why aren't the Atom people working on VSC instead?

https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors

Looks like the original contributors have mostly moved on to other projects, and activity is significantly diminished, but it's an open source project and they've not gone out of their way to block the community from continuing.

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yepthatsreality 1714 days ago
Because more than one editor based off of Electron can exist and something doesn’t have to cease just because the sheep moved to the next field.

Why does Visual Studio still exist?

Why does Sublime Text still exist?

Why does Notepad++ still exist?

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saagarjha 1714 days ago
The question was asked because Atom doesn’t seem to see much development effort anymore, while the rest of the things you mentioned do.
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yepthatsreality 1714 days ago
So we should rid it from existence? Or is this a suggestion to delete the repository?

Does Atom exist if you never need it again or the project is never maintained?

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nexuist 1713 days ago
I don't think we should get rid of Atom or anything like that, the point of my question is why the Atom contributors chose to not move on to VSC and continue to maintain Atom to the point of launching competing cloud options like Teletype. It's weird because both ventures are ultimately owned by Microsoft so it's confusing why they're paying two sets of developers to compete against each other.
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yepthatsreality 1713 days ago
Atom/GitHub wasn’t owned by Microsoft when Visual Studio Code gained traction. I’m guessing that the maintainers had no interest in giving Microsoft more help in reducing Atom to an unmaintained status and promoting Visual Studio Code for free. If the maintainers work for Microsoft now, I highly doubt it was ever a choice to move on. Teletype was probably in progress as well pre-acquisition, as that sort of feature came much much later in Visual Studio Codes development.
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