Electron decays at its roots. (#267)

“A hackable text editor for the 21st Century” once was the proud motto of yet another text editor’s working group [A22⁠¹]; only that it also served as the flagship to their shiny new platform. Web everything! were the joy-filled chants ushering in a new era of containerized Chromiums. Too elite to recognize UNIX, too elite to value Emacs. Too elite and dazzled by their own superiority stemming from one in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Git, they bestowed upon us Atom.
Eleven years later⁠², Atom gets slaughtered [G22⁠³]: GitHub got gobbled up and Redmond picked favorites: VS Code runs on the platform envisioned with Atom — like a mistletoe surviving felling, it, transiently, seems to be the one that stays.

I have fond memories of Atom: in early 2019, when I first dipped my toes into a crude Git workflow, necessitated by a university group project to build a Java compiler in Haskell, it was my tool. Not realizing and at most tentatively asking myself about the difference between a popular version control system and a no-value centralization effort re­gard­ing the very, my window into com­put­ing was a MacBook and on it my window into conducted com­put­ing GitHub Desktop and Atom.

Atom wasn’t too bad if one accepted the dulled GUI-y way of life [S99⁠⁴, pp. 46—60: “The Interface Culture”]: its shaky foundation and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of JavaScript’s strengths only possible origins being besotted Web addicts isn’t apparent to the jaded mind. It felt right at home in the form-over-everything dystopia of macOS.

As such, I personally feel less of a loss in software and more an an­ger to monopolization: as so often with this duplicitous Redmond-free software, we witnessed another instance of gulp, grief, let grieve. Sub-par software and de­sign ethe weren’t dropped, they were set in stone, hammered shut and embossed with a mark of ownership.