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Comment by bhickey | Hacker News Reader

Before cider there was Brightly. My recollection was that it was developed by a team in Atlanta and got cancelled before it reached general availability. People were pissed at the time (ex. "cancelling brightly considered harmful"). That died down when Cider delivered on what Brightly had promised.

The days of using Eclipse were particularly bleak. These days I use Antigravity for the overwhelming majority of my work.

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This is what I'm here for. Indeed the Atlanta team bet it all on Brightly, and while it was so ahead of its time, it didn't get enough of an uptake to satisfy... certain executives in engineering.

They subsequently shuttered Atlanta and it would take five or more years before they'd allow engineers there again.

It was very Google. Lost some truly talented (Hi Bruce!) software engineers who would go on to make terrific software elsewhere.

> and while it was so ahead of its time, it didn't get enough of an uptake to satisfy... certain executives in engineering.

There's more to the story than just that. Jeff might remember the particulars. I don't want to badmouth anyone on second hand information.

There was also the code search, uh, I forgot the name "quick change", I believe?

Very handy for seeing a problem, quickly solving it (sending out a CL) marking it autosubmit and just moving on.

I assume quick change became critique?

No, Critique existed before the quick edit feature was added to Code Search.

While I think the quick edits were worthwhile, it became too much too support both it and Cider (and edits in Critique), so it was removed to streamline things. As Cider became better, I think it was an okay trade-off.

There was a code reviewer starting with M before Critique iirc (Mondrian I wanna say?). The M code reviewer was completely written in Python iirc.

Yep, and written by Guido von Rossum, no less.

However, experience with it led to my sense that Python just doesn't scale (especially back then, without type annotations) past a certain size of program.

The Code Search team had been re-inventing its UI and changing a lot (changing its focus from external to internal), and had the inspiration to leverage what they'd done to create Critique. They sold Mountain View on it, and made history. Exciting times.

Yup, you guessed it.

I was the eng manager for that for a bit, added some APIs to use to do code reviews inside of Eclipse or IntelliJ. That idea never took on, but when when I showed it to the code search team in Munich, they loved it.

Critique was a fast follow.

No I mean that in code search you could click "edit" and just change something, which would then post a CL immediately, which you could set to auto-approve, for quick changes.

I believe it was part of cider (the first non-vscode version)

The first version was part of Code Search proper, and wasn't super useful for much more than just typo fixes, since it was essentially just a textarea edit box. That was eventually deprecated and replaced with a button that did the same thing, but opened in Cider instead.

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