As a programmer, before starting a project, the first thing I consider is which tool is the best fit for the job.<p>If it requires a lot of concurrency, or if the time is limited, or if needs to be used on different kinds of environments. Depending on those, I pick my toolset.<p>Atom, on the other side is actually confuses me these days, since it is a text editor to deal with thousands of lines constantly, and requires to provide both fluent experience to user and to be fast.<p>I am using Sublime Text and really happy to pay for the licence. Because in return I am getting a wonderful experience.<p>I really wanted to love Atom because it was open source, but the experience so far was unfortunately not good at all for me.<p>What was the reason for Atom developers to go with web based technologies while we know that performance is not yet great with them?<p>Is it that Javascript has really promising roadmap for upcoming years or was it something else?
What other technology is being worked on my so many large companies? It may not be as performant now as other languages but I don't doubt that it will get there. The barrier to entry to build packages is also lower seeing as a lot of developers already know web technologies.
I can't speak for the Atom devs, but JS-based apps that use a browser rendering engine to do UI (node-webkit and similar) are currently the least ugly way to do cross-platform desktop UI development.<p>Qt is a close second, but it's slower and more bloated and in many ways just as ugly.
Being web-tech based was/is basically the core feature and motivation of building Atom I believe. So I don't think they could have picked anything else (unless compile-to-js langs count).