Of course it's nice when programs are fast and not hungry. Reality is that developers happily trade performance for power of abstractions.
That's a very narrow perception of the profession. There are developers making money all over the world, and hardware prices don't scale down according to national salary levels. Even in Western Europe, that's more than a month's salary for a medium-level developer in some countries.
I’ve got 16GB in both my 7 year old iMac and 4 year old MacBook Pro. I’ll probably get a new computer next year with 32GB of RAM. I don’t think an editor using 1G-2G matters to me.
I don’t currently use Atom but if they innovate faster and eventually build a better editor, many devs will choose it.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-...
I think I had this same conversation when someone told me that the average developer can't afford the $70 for Sublime Text.
I did, for the past five years, working as a Python dev in my country of origin (Portugal). And I occasionally went to interviews, and the offers were not better than what I already made, nor did most of my college friends make more than that.
You can imagine how much some developer from an actual poor country makes.
Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.
Prices are higher here, but in any case, that's the wrong question. Those $130 are worth much more to a person making $20k/m, or to a company paying that much, especially since many costs (not just hardware) don't drop with the salary levels (and in some cases are quite higher, e.g. gas prices), and so even the share of disposable income, not just the absolute value, is much lower. So it'd be absurd to waste that meager margin on RAM just to use a fancier editor.
If you save 20 hours a year then it pays for itself. Everyone's economics are different, and the amount of time saved may be different. In the United States, you only need to save a few hours of work to make the upgrade worthwhile.
Fortunately, Atom is free so we can evaluate it to determine if it's worth the hardware upgrade.
You can use multiple browsers to preview, I prefer to have it in the editor which makes it easier to switch between (same argument for code tabs vs windows). I still test and work in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility, but being able to get the rough parts laid out in the editor itself and fix/develop on things that are the same in all browsers is a great productivity boon (especially when i'm working on my laptop with limited screen real estate).
And again, I could run everything in a separate console window, logging to files, etc... But having that in the browser is a boon to my productivity. Having notifications in the browser window that a test that was running in the background failed and being able to click a button and open right to the test file + source file that failed along with annotations about coverage data in the sidebar saves me quite a lot of time and effort.
If Atom is useless for you, don't use it! But don't act like it's garbage for everyone. I don't need a car that goes 200MPH but that doesn't mean every F1 car is entirely useless, just that it's designed for a different purpose.
I currently have 3 different atom windows open, each with 1-4 panes with probably 5-20 tabs open in each and it's using a whopping 1.8GB (super rough counting, didn't want to actually add it all up). That's a lot, but it's not enough to outweigh the benefits for me. I'm not "sticking hardly to one regardless the pain", i'm sticking to the one which makes me the most productive and is the "nicest" for me to use (if i'm frusturated by constantly finding windows, i'm not going to be a better developer) It might be too slow/bloated/whatever for you, and that's okay, but for me it's more than fine.
Those cars use huge resources for extreme performance. I don't think Atom provides extreme performance even after using extreme resources.
An F1 car is going to be the worst tow truck in existence. It's "towing performance" is basically a 0/100.
Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity. the 2GB of ram that my atom windows are currently using is a very very small price to pay for better productivity.
Even if Atom were so resource hungry that I needed to buy a new laptop every other year for $5000 (which I don't), if it makes me more than 2% more productive, it's paid for itself.
Yet there are lots of people who are extremely productive with vim. So I don't think you can pit subjective metrics (productivity) against objective (RAM usage) here.
Which is the OPs exact point. While some people value their editor being very light on ram, other people value other things, and that's okay.
Thats fair. I also find Nissan sentra lot more productive than high perf cars. But if I claim it is extreme performance car in a room full of people, I do not know people will be polite or laugh me out of room.
I'm just too old for flame wars with their-own-church believers. I just need to write code, so I switch tools to appropriate ones. It's just a tool. I'm sure that some hammer-loving guys do all things with hammers, even if that's terribly hard.
If you really think that Atom has "extreme performance", you really don't know other tools that are on the market.
Good luck, the hardware industry will love you even more.
If you are more productive doing things another way, that's fantastic! I use IDEA when i'm working in Java code, I use Atom when i'm working with web stuff, I use tail/grep when searching through log files, I use CLI tools as much as possible for everything else as they integrate with things like editors and IDE's very easily.
Everything is a tradeoff, and nothing is perfect. Atom enables me to be a better dev in some areas, and is frustratingly awful in others. But I do genuinely love the editor. I'm glad someone has finally made the tradeoffs that I prefer in an editor, as for me reducing memory usage by a few hundred MB will make literally 0 difference in my life, but adding the ability to click a spot in the embedded browser window and have it take me to the code that defines that component is a nice productivity boost.
than what ? wtf is worse than atom. Even notepad++ is better.
Last time I used visual studio it was great, levels of magnitude better than notepad++, but not quite as good as intellij.
If Atom is so resource hungry, and I have alternatives which are not = IMHO the editor is a bad editor.
Use whatever you like, but it looks like the most important thing is that you like it, not that it's resource hungry.
> Not to mention that a 6MB file is pretty fucking big for something like atom.
This it the most funny part of your comment. I want my editor to open my files as they are. Some people could be happy with editors allowing for max. 20 lines per file, and I'm sure they would also claim that longer files are bad, so it's fine that an editor doesn't support that.
Use whatever you like, but don't claim that using 3GB of ram to open 6MB file is fine, because programmers couldn't implement that properly. It's not the file's fault that it cannot be opened normally. Really don't blame the file.
Atom was designed as an editor for web developers. They took some trade offs when building it, and because of that opening large files is difficult for it. When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.
It's not that the Atom programmers couldn't implement it properly (FFS they built github, i'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory...), just that it didn't make sense to for the usecase atom was meant for.
But it doesn't seem like i'm going to convince you, so I guess we can agree to disagree!
No one is claiming the opposite. An appropriate argument is that some nails are bigger than others and this hammer in particular chokes on big nails.
> When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.
Breaking your workflow in the name of progress seems counterintuitive.
> I'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory.
The realities of Atom prove otherwise.
Using another editor where opening large files doesn't break my workflow, but needing to alt-tab over to the browser to see how my changes look does is much worse for me. I look at log files every few days at most, and generally while they are on another system.
I look at the results of my development on my app hundreds of times a day.
If it's different for you, then Atom might not be the best tool for you!
Likewise for tools that imbue the user with a blind eye and patronizing tone.
Except in this case, we're comparing two hammers - just different brands. If we were trying to use Microsoft Word to code, you'd have a point.
To do what ? Open another terminal ? /s
Submit a PR and be done with it! Viva la open source revolución!
Edit: can't remember off hand the reason I switched, idle ram usage or latency possibly
For showing the html I just use multiple browsers. My page must look good in multiple browsers, not in my editor. For the whole environment I just consoles with full logging, and running different parts. For database I have another specialized editor - much better than any IDE.
I have opened a couple javascript files in Atom. About 30, all quite short, about 50-100kB each. The total memory used by Atom was over 900MB.
Should I be just a brainless monkey, and be happy that it's fine? Well, my machine has lots of ram, but I need it to some other things as well.
For me Atom is just useless, I don't even get half of the functionality I get from Idea and it uses twice as memory just for beginning.
I think most of the comments to mine would be: just use the editor normally, no one is opening 20 files at the same time, just learn how to code, and have one small file opened.
So instead of learning some good tools, you just prefer sticking hardly to one regardless the pain. OK, good luck with that. I just need a fast editor with lots of functionality and great speed. Atom doesn't give me that.