Sublime Forum

To stay or to leave of this community

#85

He left his job as a software engineer at Google in 2007 to work on Sublime full time.

Source: sublimetext.com/blog/article … ext-editor

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#86

left Google in 2007 to work on Sublime full time.

That only lasted a few months, for a long time in ST’s history, Jon was burning the candle at both ends, running a full time job while pushing forward.

There were times when it seemed completely infeasible as a business, but he persevered.

Jon may not be all that responsive, but I think he’s more attentive than most would probably think.

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#87

Hahahahahah, nothing like some light entertainment on an friday afternoon.

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#88

Mod? Can we please ban the spammer already!

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#89

@DisposaBoy

Doesn’t really bother me.

It’s not like he’s posting all the time on a heap of different threads (or is he ??? :smile:

@Arjan

Seriously, I’ve noticed it over the years.

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#90

[quote=“castles_made_of_sand”]@DisposaBoy

Doesn’t really bother me.

It’s not like he’s posting all the time on a heap of different threads (or is he ??? :smile:
[/quote]

Nope, DisposaBoy doesn’t know the difference between a spammer and a disgruntled customer. I guess his nick is a big clue.

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#91

[quote=“sublimator”]>>> left Google in 2007 to work on Sublime full time.

That only lasted a few months, for a long time in ST’s history, Jon was burning the candle at both ends, running a full time job while pushing forward.

There were times when it seemed completely infeasible as a business, but he persevered.[/quote]

We were told there were two new employees (Hong and Kari) though.

The lack of community dialog is baffling. 2 years of silence on userecho, four months since the last blog post and tweet, not a single response to the community managed issues list, not even acknowledging its existence and months between dev releases with few changes to show for it.

Should people really have to wonder whether the development is ongoing or not?

During a period of less than one month I managed to single-handedly duplicate enough of ST3’s backend functionality on my spare time to be able to run and pass the full test suite of the ST3 plugin Vintageous. An effort which was born out of the lack of communication in the first place.

I seriously hope you are working on something completely different than Sublime Text, because how 3 people can accomplish so little is just beyond me.

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#92

I support what quarnster says in the previous post. I also find it strange if the project is alive and the level of communication is in its present state. I too expressed my concerns that my bug report was not paid any attention to although it seems to me like a major bug (and I’m also a registered user if it makes any difference). Of course the author can communicate with us any way he likes or not at all, but the project seem abandoned at the moment and unless this is the author’s intention he could always drop a line in the blog/status to keep the community interested - after all Sublime Text is great, but without the community and all the great plugins and our hard work it would be a little more than nice autocomplete and multi-edit capabilities - besides that just another programmer’s notepad with buggy macros. I hope it is just a suspense before another world changing release and the project is alive and will not die as closed source. Right now there is no other editor that is even remotely as good as Sublime Text and if I have to return to Notepad++ I will feel like going back to the stone age.

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#93

If it is, I’d say the priorities are royally screwed up. A small “for the next 6 months we’ll be working day and night implementing awesome new functionality, pardon the lack of communication!” would make a huge difference. Right now there’s no communication at all about what to expect which is really disrespectful to the paying customers.

I mean, if you had asked a friend to pick you up at the airport, and then you missed your flight, would you call to let them know or would you decline to answer every time they were calling to ask where you were?

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#94

Don’t get your hopes up, there were months of silence before the first v3 release, and ST2 and ST3 basically is the same editor (the only difference i really notice is Goto Symbol, but that’s… like… one feature.)

Baffling.

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#95

[quote=“quarnster”]

[quote=“sublimator”]>>> left Google in 2007 to work on Sublime full time.

That only lasted a few months, for a long time in ST’s history, Jon was burning the candle at both ends, running a full time job while pushing forward.

There were times when it seemed completely infeasible as a business, but he persevered.[/quote]

We were told there were two new employees (Hong and Kari) though.

The lack of community dialog is baffling. 2 years of silence on userecho, four months since the last blog post and tweet, not a single response to the community managed issues list, not even acknowledging its existence and months between dev releases with few changes to show for it.

Should people really have to wonder whether the development is ongoing or not?

During a period of less than one month I managed to single-handedly duplicate enough of ST3’s backend functionality on my spare time to be able to run and pass the full test suite of the ST3 plugin Vintageous. An effort which was born out of the lack of communication in the first place.

I seriously hope you are working on something completely different than Sublime Text, because how 3 people can accomplish so little is just beyond me.[/quote]

I think it is the combination of the lack of respect for his customers and the lack of priority of the project.
I suspect he works on something else he finds more interesting than ST and this is just a side project.

It’s a shame, I really love Sublime, and would love to see him sell it off to someone who gives a shit.

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#96

I feel the same way but it was clearly stated, before paying:

[quote]NO WARRANTIES
SUBLIME HQ PTY LTD expressly disclaims any warranty for SUBLIME TEXT, which is provided ‘as is’ without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including but not limited to any warranties of merchantability, non-infringement, or fitness of a particular purpose.[/quote]

Nevertheless it will be a shame if the project dies as closed source, or even if the project lives on it will be a shame that our trust/support for the project is shaken by the lack of communication, because Sublime is much of what it is because of the community.

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#97

A couple of observations:
jps has posted 300 times this year. Across all sub-forums. That’s, um, lessee… yup. One post per day.
In 2012, he posted 572 times, across all sub-forums. That’s 1.6 posts per day. So he may be a bit off his pace this year, but I suspect he also has more to do.
So, I don’t know where this guy comes up with the “months of silence” BS. Consider the time it takes to triage ‘bug’ reports and tech support ‘requests’ (demands), prioritize them, do the R&D to come up with a fix… AND do new development, testing, and dev builds. Experienced working programmers who also have to do tech support understand what a demanding pace that is. Obnoxious whiney-baby prima donnas just want more, right now.

I think I’d be inclined to cut the man some slack.

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#98

[quote=“oldwarhorse”]A couple of observations:
jps has posted 300 times this year. Across all sub-forums. That’s, um, lessee… yup. One post per day.
[/quote]

So the problem is that you don’t understand statistics.

300 times this year is because he is very active in very few threads - so one day he spends tens of posts on a couple of narrow issues.

You should rather consider how many threads he doesn’t answer, unanswered mails, public bug tracker being ignored, etc, etc, etc.

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#99

Which is no excuse for not treating customers well.

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#100

[quote=“Arjan”]
You should rather consider how many threads he doesn’t answer, unanswered mails, public bug tracker being ignored, etc, etc, etc.[/quote]

I don’t think it works like that.

However, I find the 300 posts almost unbelievable. You know, I’ve been following his posts for more than a year now (yes, ALL his posts) and it certainly doesn’t feel like he made 1 post a day already. Yes, there was more activity around march/april or whenever the first ST3 betas were released, but was it really that much?

Anyway, I don’t think I need to repeat what others already said.

@quarnster: I agree 100% with what you say, except that ST probably has a lot of underlying code that you did not implement yet. However, I am really excited for your editor project. I don’t know any Go but I am following. (Also, when you’re implementing an API, I beg you to not only support the sublime API but also provide your own less clustered API. :wink: )

Maybe the other 2 employees are more verbose that Jon, but since they don’t seem to have joined the forum we can’t really see anything.

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#101

To be honest with you a lot of people come off as really naive on this thread. I say that because if you think a tool built by one person has a high chance of being supported well and to a greater degree even being around very long you probably haven’t been around very long. I have been scared in a sense to throw money or time into ST because of the high probability it would go dark, or move along in a pattern I don’t care to spend time on following. Anyone ever use TextMate on OSX, granted it’s open sourced now. With all that said ST is great from a usability stand point minus any bugs you may hit, but I have not spent the time building my workflow into it out of fear that it would start to taper off on the dev and support side.

If you want something that stands the test of time use emacs, vim, or put some elbow grease into Lime and make a modern day vim come to life.

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#102

Lime: github.com/quarnster/lime

At least the rationale in the README is spot on :smile:

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#103

[quote=“FichteFoll”]
However, I find the 300 posts almost unbelievable. You know, I’ve been following his posts for more than a year now (yes, ALL his posts) and it certainly doesn’t feel like he made 1 post a day already. Yes, there was more activity around march/april or whenever the first ST3 betas were released, but was it really that much?[/quote]

I didn’t go by ‘feel’. I used ‘Advanced Search’ and put ‘jps’ in the author field. You can do the same thing if you don’t ‘believe’ me. It shows 10 posts per page. 30 pages in 2013, and 57 pages in 2012. Plus 2 on page 88. That’s 300, and 572. Like I said.

There were 2 standout stretches in 2013 with no posts. One during the first 2 weeks of 2013, and one for about 6 weeks, from Sept.1 to Oct. 16.

And, I thought it would have been obvious, but apparently there are those who just need it spelled out for them, so, ok: Yesterday’s julian day number was 300. 300 posts divided by 300 days amounts to an a-v-e-r-a-g-e of 1 post per day. Got it?
Granted, I only took one semester of stats, as I got permission to trade one out for advanced algorithms. But I think I got enough out of it for this exercise.

Ya know, you guys can do what ever you want. I don’t give a crap. I got nothin’ invested here. Except $59 and a pretty decent experience with the tool. I’ve somehow managed to use it to pump out about 22k lines of CoffeeScript in the last 13 months, with no real complaints. Coupla glitches, but I worked around them, with the help of information I found in these forums. If it goes dark, I’ve got plenty of other tools and resources. Not that worried about it.

But I know a railroad job when I see it.

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#104

You certainly didn’t go by brains. All your stats are irrelevant for all those customers who experience a complete communication blackout.

This guy’s sentiments are a good read: github.com/quarnster/lime/blob/master/README.md

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