Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

After 10 years in Vim and 5 years in Emacs, I recently switched to Atom. The reason I switched is how easy it is to extend. And it truly is: I was up and running in a few hours with my first plugin in Atom (the emacs legacy of code is daunting, while vimscript is truly awful). This is a great resource, which I had patched together while I was building my first plugins.

One major downide of atom is that while you can develop your own plugins, core atom modules are extremely slow to accept contributions. I spent a lot of time on something (https://github.com/atom/tree-view/pull/913) which makes sense in core but is hard to do as a package, and it's been ignored, along with 42 other PRs on the same repo.

I really like Atom for its hackability, but an important part of hackability is community contribution. Their roadmap is 404ing (http://blog.atom.io/2014/10/23/public-roadmap.html), they don't really take public contributions, and AFAICT there's no public product direction of any kind. I hope they solve this - Atom is too good to lose to bad community management.

Thanks very much for the feedback! We're always excited to hear when people enjoy using Atom.

It is true that we have been extremely slow to accept contributions. There are many causes for this, not the least of which is that we are a small team of maintainers working on a very large and ambitious project. Whatever the causes, it is something that I am committed to fixing. I'm working with the engineering manager on a new system of prioritization to burn down the backlog of PRs needing review (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=user%3Aatom+is%3A...). We feel we've made some good progress because of it.

We took down the roadmap because it wasn't being maintained by the team anymore. (I'll amend the blog post to note that fact.) We felt that no roadmap is better than an incorrect one. The best we can offer right now for a public roadmap is what is currently being worked on by the official Atom maintainers. There is an easy GitHub search linked in the Atom FAQ on the subject (https://discuss.atom.io/t/is-there-an-atom-roadmap/21033). Longer term this is also something that we are going to be increasing transparency on.

Again, thank you for calling out these problems. Community contribution is important to us. We're having some growing pains right now, yes. We are committed to fixing them and I and the rest of the team hope that you and others with the same concerns will stick with us while we work out exactly how to fix them!

I'm the engineering manager lee-dohm mentioned and I just want to echo his sentiment.

We recognize this problem and are working hard to improve it! We're of course thrilled by how popular Atom is, but as you've seen, it's been a real challenge to keep up with the size of the community. The team is small, but growing!

In fact, if you're interested in getting paid to help us fix this, apply to join the team! Openings for engineers on the Atom team will be posted here later this week: https://github.com/about/jobs#positions

Atom is too good to have this comment be the top one on the article - alas I can't delete it.

It looks like I was wrong about the community contribution. They mentioned it elsewhere: the maintainers of the module I was happened to both be on paternity leave. I suspect they didn't mention it here because they didn't want it to seem like an excuse, but of course people should be able to take paternity leave without worrying about some errant comment on HN giving them a bad day.

Also, the response was excellent: https://github.com/atom/tree-view/pull/913

As soon as they came back it was resolved quickly, my PR got a review, and another one was accepted. All in all, I'm feeling much better about the community part of Atom, and thoroughly sorry for raising a fuss!

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