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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.

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I haven't worked for someone in years and that totally passed on me. I've tried code several times because of specific platforms it has plugins for but I never seen it as even comparable, at least not more than sublime.

No idea what problems people had with Atom, but I really hope some fork let it live on.

There's https://github.com/atom-community/atom, hoping that or similar will gain traction

whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazing and try to change everything now, or slowly acclimate to the workflow and then start suggesting changes/updates from inside. if you're hired as a 10x dev, then maybe guns blazing works, but if you're not, i'd suggest the latter.

Somewhat unrelated, but why is it that when someone online writes an emoji with a nose, ie ;) vs ;-), I can immediately tell it's an older person? Was that something that was taught back in the day?

It like when i receive a text when no punctuation, i can tell it is a younger person. anyone using emoticons vs emojis should be the indicator in and of itself regardless if there's a nose or not. how many times did you have to push that number to get to the symbol? "huh?" you ask. shows me your age too.

Hah, bucking the trend there with your lack of capitalization.

that's too many pushes of the same button, so we all learned caps are a waste. also, e e cummings. ;) lol <eyeroll> or is it :eyeroll:

> that's too many pushes of the same button, so we all learned caps are a waste

No we didn't, because on a computer it doesn't require any meaningful extra effort (unless you're a lazy kid -> another age indicator), and pre-smartphones... texting actually used to cost money. You'd probably have a plan of some 1000 free text messages / month, or sth., which isn't that much if you're a teenager, given that a text messages was limited to ~140 characters (yes, that's where Twitter's limit came from - SMS compatibility).

Caps, instead of being waste, let you skip whitespace. Instead of writing "caps are a waste", you'd write "CapsAreAWaste" (and then possibly shorten it to "CapsRAWaste"). We'd cut the message length by some 20-30% this way, which mattered for longer messages - it would turn a 4 SMS long message into a 3 SMS long one. We'd of course optimize harder when we were close to message length boundary.

Being efficient with text messaging was a critical social life skill when I was young.

Yes.

(Damn, it's hard to find a "list of emoticons" (or even "usenet faq") from back in the day now. So much more recent stuff clogging the search results.)

Anyway, this list of emoticons from '94 (according to the internet archive) is a pretty good representative of the sort of thing that people passed around then:

https://ia802801.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/23...

As you can see, most have noses.

Also, RFC-1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) from October '95 has one example of a smiley in §2.1.1: "Use smileys to indicate tone of voice, but use them sparingly. :-) is an example of a smiley (Look sideways)." I suspect that at least one of the bibliographical references provided would have contained a decent list of them at the time, but so many links are dead now. (And even if some of the ftp ones still exist, most browsers have dropped ftp support now, so most people are kinda SOL there anyway.)

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html

Oh you’ve been programming only for a few decades?

I want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. I’m actually a cosmic entity that views time as an artificial construct. When you’ve been around for centuries like I have, you’ll understand that trends/fads are mere points in the time space-continuum. Don’t get bent out of shape when you see one.

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