Performance in Factor, Java, and Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://ideolalia.com/performance-in-clojure-and-factor

<comment><USER2> Clojure "beating" Java performance seems like an odd claim, since they both compile to the same thing. Doesn't that simply imply the approach/algorithm is better?

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference in performance is because the Clojure code is targeting the GPU rather than the CPU. This generally results in a faster, but more verbose solution (see this "hello world" in OpenCL: [http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Perform...](http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/OpenCL_MacProgGuide/Example:Hello,World/Example:Hello,World.html)).

However, the defmap and defreduce macros in the snippet abstract away all that boilerplate, resulting in something that is both significantly faster than the standard approach, and significantly more concise. The Factor vs. Java benchmark seemed like a decent way to demonstrate that.

<comment><USER3> "The difference in performance is because the Clojure code is targeting the GPU rather than the CPU."

In that case wouldn't a fairer comparison be between java code that targets the GPU and factor code that _also_ targets the GPU. Right now its seems that the only valid conclusions is code that targets the GPU is better than code that targets the CPU (for certain kinds of tasks).

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned in the post that it wasn't an apples to apples comparison.

That being said, I think that ease of development is a more practical metric for comparison than the underlying methods. Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, which has useful vector functionality, so it ends up being simpler and more concise to target the GPU than it would be to write it in plain Clojure. You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance.

<comment><USER3> " Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, "

How so more than factor? Factor (like Forth) is just a set of words and it is easy to conceive of a GLSL vocabulary for it(I use "vocabulary" in the Forth/Factor sense).

How is "10 sq 5 - ." (Factor/Forth) "less translatable" than "(- (square 10) 5)" [Clojure/lisp]?

" You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance."

Well here we aren't talking of most cases ( :-) )but specifically Factor vs Clojure. I hope you take the time to explain why you think Clojure is superior to Factor in _this_ respect (if that is the point you were making). Comparing metrics of languages compiling to different chips make little sense.

Comparing Clojure compiling to the GPU and Factor compiling to the CPU makes as much sense as comparing Clojure compiling to Intel and Factor comparing to something entirely different (say the ARM). Specific tasks will be faster on one or the other. So what? Two things differ(the language being compiled and the compiled to chip) making any "comparisons", at best dubious.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I understand it, Factor has a regular grammar and macros, so I don't see any reason why it couldn't do exactly what I've done here with Clojure.

My comment above was referring more to Java, which is generally considered to be the apex of potential performance for Clojure, but which would completely incapable of something like this. I didn't mean to lump Factor and Java together, sorry for the imprecision.

<comment><USER3> "My comment above was referring more to Java, which is generally considered to be the apex of potential performance for Clojure, but which would completely incapable of something like this."

Ok, No arguments then, if the expressiveness, succinctness and malleability of java vs Clojure were the point of comparison. Factor vs Clojure would be a dead heat I imagine.

The original article makes the statement

" That's 4x faster than the optimized Factor code, and more than 10x faster than Java."

I was saying _this_ comparison is not only meaningless but misleading. The statements should be something like

"The Clojure code (which compiles to the GPU) is 4x faster than the optimized Factor code (which compiles to the CPU) , and more than 10x faster than Java(which compiles to the CPU). GPUs and CPUs make different speed tradeoffs so the above is meaningless btw "

For language speed comparisons to be (somewhat) meaningful, they should have a common baseline environment. If each language compiles to a different type of chip (GPU vs CPU in this case) there is no valid "comparison".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Misleading title - it should definitely include the fact that the clojure implementation was GPU based.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wondering if maybe someone familiar with penumbra could explain to me why on earth they chose to go with JOGL instead of LWJGL. Doesn't the latter have far more activity going on with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I chose the one that seemed closer to vanilla OpenGL, because that's all I really wanted. I don't claim to be an expert, though. What would LWJGL give me that JOGL doesn't?

<comment><USER5> I'm not an expert either, but a while back I spent over a year looking into the whole Java OpenGL gaming thing. I started out working with the Xith3D library and made some contributions to it, but soon it became painfully clear that the best 3D library for Java was jMonkeyEngine, and it used lwjgl.

Looking further into it I think I found that JOGL seemed to be a somewhat abandoned project (sortof like Java3D), and that the real action was with LWJGL/jMonkeyEngine. Both had a far larger and more active community, and LWJGL supported more OpenGL features, and LWJGL may have been faster than JOGL too, although again, you're bringing up a fairly old memories, so I can't say they're perfectly accurate, I may in fact be spewing nonsense.

I'd say take a look at both and compare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it further. The code that binds Penumbra to JOGL is pretty small, so it would be easy to swap something else in if it seems clearly superior.

<comment><USER5> Great! Thanks for considering it, and if it's that easy then Penumbra would be even more appealing for supporting both. I'm hoping to get back into the Java world through Clojure, so I'm very happy to see that a project like Penumbra is there!

<comment><USER6> From what I can tell, JOGL is preferable in at least one situation: Applets. Since the code is signed by Sun, it's a lot less hassle to run it in a browser than if you had to get hold of signatures yourself. Might be something worth bearing in mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trump Administration Is Thirsty for War, Intelligence Be Damned: Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/war-iran-trump-administration-intelligence-835531/ <comment><USER2> Omg. Pundits were saying the same thing about North Korea, that Trump was prepping 100k troops for that invasion. When will they catch on to Trump's negotiation style?</comment>


Clinical trial of chloroquine use to combat coronavirus raises safety concerns - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2765270 <comment><USER2> Previously discussed on news.ycombinator.com:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880686)</comment>


How To Create an Ownership Mentality on Your Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/career/3-ways-to-create-an-ownership-mentality-within-your-team/

<comment><USER2> The easiest way to get a team invested in their work is to _make them invested in their work_. Smart people want _actual_ ownership and a real say in the projects they are working on.

This article is a joke.

<comment><USER3> You must be advocating that to confer real ownership, people need to invest by purchasing a stake in what they work on. Just like a real owner, they will not necessarily have a salary and may be required to dip into their savings and increase their investment in order to cover losses in the business.

Are you sure that's what most people want? Or do they want to make a substantial guaranteed salary plus have all the upside of profit sharing, while taking on none of the risks? Those who prefer the former should be founders in their own startup where the reward is proportional to the risk.

<comment><USER2> Most smart people confident in their skills would be happy with profit sharing and/or real equity in their work. Even founders draw a (quite substantial) salary.

The word "ownership" implies "owning" something.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you on what ownership means. And who wouldn't want to be a post- funding owner where they can draw a nice salary and where the only thing they risk is their time and other people's money? Few want to take on pre-funding ownership where the starting salary is $0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> step 1: give actual ownership.

<comment><USER5> ^ Better advice in fewer words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What sort of sorcery has gotten this on the front page? The article is ridiculous and the website hurts my sensibilities. WTH?

</comment><comment><USER7> I think I used that stock photo on a client's website once. It was the cheapest "teamwork" photo.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite web font for long texts? - <AUTHOR>

We, as the Hacker News crowd, are reading blog posts, magazine articles and the like every day. And maybe you find some web fonts more readable or more pleasant than others.<p>So what are your favorite web fonts for long texts? <comment><USER2> Whatever the browser's default proportional font is. Then the user can choose what works for _them_ and not what you happen to like. (A lot of what makes a font "good" is very subjective.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find Georgia to be very readable.

My advice (as an amateur =):

\- always apply a generous line height

\- do dark-grey (#333) on white (instead of the standard black on white, which is a bit too much contrast for my taste)

like this: [https://jsfiddle.net/ot6oeakp/](https://jsfiddle.net/ot6oeakp/)

<comment><USER4> That's a really nice combination, but for some reason I don't like it on my blog. Maybe the background is a bit too much 'white', while in your fiddle is gray which makes the font looks even more awesome. Ty for sharing.

<comment><USER3> yeah, I mean Georgia and geek topics do not "marry" that well imho =)

I checked out your blog btw and I have to say that I loved this post:

[http://www.convalesco.org/articles/2014/04/22/please-dont- ch...](http://www.convalesco.org/articles/2014/04/22/please-dont-change-the- world/)

couldnt agree more

<comment><USER4> Oh thanks a lot! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whatever I have sans-serif set to in my browser. I just checked and it is Arial. I don't mind what you use as long as it renders correctly which most explicit choices seem to fail to do so.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd be really curious to get some responses. The appropriateness of web fonts is a difficult topic I've been wondering about for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cardo looks great with a nice line-height. It's the font Leo Babauta uses for his blog Zen Habits.

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Cardo](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Cardo)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's Lora for me. [http://typecast.com/preview/google/Lora](http://typecast.com/preview/google/Lora)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To answer my own question: I like Noto Serif, Lora, PT Serif, and Habibi very much.

</comment><comment><USER9> I make it simple, black on white: font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; line-height: 1.3em; font-size: 13px;

</comment><comment><USER10> Open Sans and Segoe UI</comment>


Taking headless mainstream – Learnings from the founder of Moltin (YC W15) - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/headless-commerce-cracking-conundrum-adam-sturrock/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've had some space and time to reflect since moving on from Moltin (headless commerce platform & API recently acquired by Elastic Path). I recently wrote an article where I shared some of my observations and learnings over the past 7 years and layout where I see the future landscape of eCommerce and headless converging 2-5 years from now. It seems to have struck a chord with other thought leaders on Linkedin over the past few days so thought others might find it useful here. I think there may be some takeaways for everyone in the commerce/headless space that reads this, whether you're an online retailer/brand evaluating software solutions, an analyst, consultant or developer, a headless commerce platform delivering services or even more broadly in the software space.</comment>


The Banach–Tarski paradox - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

<comment><USER2> Q: What's an anagram of "Banach-Tarski"? A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski

</comment><comment><USER3> The most interesting thing about the BT paradox, for me, is its interplay with the Axiom Of Choice. Most of the mathematics I did as part of my PhD would fall apart without AC, but I still remember being very unsettled by BT.

 _The existence of nonmeasurable sets, such as those in the Banach–Tarski paradox, has been used as an argument against the axiom of choice. Nevertheless, most mathematicians are willing to tolerate the existence of nonmeasurable sets, given that the axiom of choice has many other mathematically useful consequences._

<comment><USER4> The funny things is that the same result for an orbit on a sphere doesn't need the Axiom Of Choice at all. It just uses the concept of actual infinity.

 _"the axiom of choice has many other mathematically useful consequences."_ is an understatement. It's like a life in Space. You _can_ live in Space (in a specially design isolated constructions e.g., a space station); you even can go outside (not for long and only if you are wearing a space-suit) but It is much much easier to live on the Earth.

<comment><USER5> I'd be interested in seeing a reference for the result on the sphere, if you have one.

<comment><USER4> It is the theorem from a dead-tree math-textbook where it is used as a step in a Banach-Tarski Paradox proving.

The textbook is not in English. Here's a translation of the theorem:

An orbit O [1] can be decomposed into 4 sets: A, B, C, D. Using rotation these sets can be combined into 2 orbits:

      A ∪ aB = O; C ∪ bD = O

Proof:

      A = H(a)x; B = H(a')x; C = H(b)x; D = H(b')x

The theorem statement follows from the fact that the free group H can be decomposed into 4 parts:

      H(a),H(a'),H(b),H(b')

and doubled by rotations:

      H = aH(a') ∪ H(a); H = bH(b') ∪ H(b)

∎

__ [1]: The term `orbit` is used in the same sense as in [2]. `H` is a free group similar to the one from the step 3 in [2], and `a`, `b` are rotations defined similar to Step 2 in [2] i.e., they are generators of H:

      H = {e}∪H(a)∪H(a')∪H(b)∪H(b')

, where `e` is the unit of the group H:

      aa' = e; bb' = e

__ [2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox>

<comment><USER5> I can't follow either of the proofs yet, but one question does pose itself: given a decomposition of the sphere, don't you get a decomposition of the ball, just by projecting towards the origin?

Of course what happens at the origin itself is not clear. Perhaps there's no way of getting around that difficulty. If you could deal with that, however, a proof on the sphere would be equivalent to a proof on the ball.

<comment><USER4> An orbit is not a sphere. To get the result for a sphere we need AC in some form.

The result for the sphere are easily generalized on a ball (first without a center, then with the center).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Infinite set paradoxing has become a morbid infection that is today spreading in a way that threatens the very life of probability theory, and requires immediate surgical removal._ \--- E.T. Jaynes

It applies to other theories as well. Giving real-life meaning to a construction based on infinity and then shouting "paradox!" seems counter- productive.

</comment><comment><USER7> "The Banach-Tarski Gyroscope is an intricate mechanism believed to have been constructed using the Axiom of Choice. On each complete rotation counterclockwise, the Banach-Tarski Gyroscope doubles in volume while maintaining its shape and density; on rotating clockwise, the volume is halved. When first discovered, fortunately in the midst of interstellar space, the Banach-Tarski Gyroscope was tragically mistaken for an ordinary desk ornament. Subsequently it required a significant portion of the available energy of the contemporary galactic civilization to reverse the rotation before nearby star systems were endangered; fortunately, the Banach-Tarski Gyroscope still obeys lightspeed limitations on rotation rates, and cannot grow rapidly once expanding past planetary size. After the subsequent investigation, the Banach-Tarski Gyroscope was spun clockwise and left spinning."

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this the one that was mocked by Feynman?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is. Feynman was not a big fan of things that couldn't be proved experimentally.

<comment><USER9> Feynman's strength (well, one of them) was that he insisted on a simple example to follow during an experiment. This is an incredibly powerful technique for understanding complex calculations, and no doubt many hackers here use it when doing a code walk-through.

The problem was that the mathematicians fell into the trap Feynman laid and gave overly simple descriptions. Feynman seduced them into trying to give physical descriptions when it was, in truth, important to think about the details.

Banach-Tarski is a specific example of that, as many of you will know. I think Feynman knew full well what he was doing - just one of the games he played.

The technique has its limitations too. Restricting yourself to consider only the physical loses the power of abstraction. Many of you know that too, although perhaps you don't think of it that way. When you extract a method you're using abstraction - the method may not represent something physical. Feynman's technique can limit you there.

The story comes from "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynam", in the chapter called "A Different Box of Tools."

[http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?a=DisplayParaSent&fname=...](http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?a=DisplayParaSent&fname=Richard%20Feynman%5CChapter12)

Feynman makes a big deal about having unusual tools in the box - they let you solve problems that others find intractable. That's one real lesson. Acquire a wide variety tools, and know how to use them. Functional, Object Oriented, Imperative, Logic, Database, etc. They all have their place, and knowing them, really knowing them, gives you enormous flexibility.

Never stop learning new tricks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stan Wagon's book about the B-T paradox is absolutely superb, but for mathematicians only. I've heard good things about Wapner's "The pea and the sun", intended for a lay audience -- e.g., the reviews at <http://www.maa.org/reviews/PeaSun.html> and <http://www.ams.org/notices/200609/rev-komjath.pdf> \-- but I haven't read it myself.

(Speaking of Stan Wagon and beautiful mathematical exposition, his drably- titled paper "Fourteen proofs of a result about tiling a rectangle" is lovely and quite accessible. You can find it on the web with a bit of googling; I don't know whether any copy you can find in this way is legal.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Be careful, friends... digging too deep into set theory is one of the surest ways to go insane. You quickly reach the edge of what you consciousness can handle.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sort of a reductio ad absurdum proof against infinities? :)

<comment><USER9> Well, against the Axiom of Choice, at least.

Attempts were once made to show that Euclid's fifth postulate could be deduced from the others by assuming it was false, and seeing where that led. A perfectly valid technique, as you know. Several assumed that it succeeded, because the conclusions were so obviously ludicrous, and from that it was assumed that Euclid's geometry was the only one.

Of course, now we know that the conclusions weren't contradictions, and are "simply" non-Euclidean geometries.

"Counter-Intuitive" is not the same as "Contradiction."

Just because the Axiom of Choice leads to such counter-intuitive results it doesn't mean they're not true. Just because infinities lead to bigger infinities (via Cantor), flasks of finite volume but infinite surface area,

<http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/277351.aspx>

and hotels that never run out of room,

[http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=5584228&t...](http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=5584228&tstart=0)

it doesn't mean that they aren't useful, or don't, in some sense, exist.</comment></comment>


Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress? - <AUTHOR> https://deliciousbrains.com/wordpress-gutenberg/ <comment><AUTHOR> Personally, as someone who makes a living building stuff on WordPress, I am extremely concerned about this transition.

First off, I don't think Automattic has handled communicating it very well. Gutenberg is going to be a big, seismic change in what WordPress is. It seems reasonable to expect _lots_ of themes and plugins will break when it goes live, especially older ones that haven't been as actively maintained.

And yet, if you surveyed the global WordPress userbase, I'd be amazed if you found even 10% of them were aware that such a change is even on the horizon. The communication to developers around Gutenberg has been hit or miss, but at least they've been making an effort on that front. In terms of communicating to the general WP-using public, other than a notice in the dashboard in the most recent version, I'm not aware of there having actually _been_ any. So there are going to be a lot of "WTF" moments when people update to 5.0 and things start breaking or behaving contrary to expectations.

Secondly, I fear that Gutenberg is going to split the WordPress developer community. WP has always been a PHP project; if you wanted to contribute, whether to WP core itself or by writing themes or plugins, PHP was the language you needed to know to do that. Gutenberg, however, is all React- based, which means now there will be two classes of WP developers: people working on things that don't touch Gutenberg, who will be writing PHP, and people working on things that _do_ , who will be writing JavaScript/React.

(My suspicion, even though Automattic has denied it strenuously, is that the master plan is to slowly phase out PHP and turn WordPress into a React-only project. So after Gutenberg, we will see more and more components of WP getting rewritten in React, until one day there just won't be any PHP left anymore.)

Thing is, I don't know a lot of PHP developers who are also React whizzes, or vice versa. So I fear that Automattic is taking one of the core reasons for WordPress' success, its absolutely huge developer community, and throwing it overboard. If the plan really is for WP to become a React project, a whole lot of PHP developers are going to need to become React developers in relatively short order. Some will be able to make that transition, but I worry that many will not. Maybe it will pick up enough new React fans to make up for them, I dunno. But that seems like an optimistic read to me.

The more I learn about Gutenberg, the more I wish Automattic had just started a second, React-based project and used that as a clean sheet of paper, rather than taking all these ideas and trying to jam them into WordPress to make some sort of software turducken.

<comment><USER2> I think the oddest part of Automattic's handling of this is that they are ramming this through, skirting a lot of quality controls such as accessibility (something they recently canned to meet deadline) but yet have the minimum requirement for Wordpress on very much dead PHP versions, 5.2-5.4. They also claim to be community driven, yet...they aren't even listening to the community on this. It's wild. I guess maybe their overall goal is to make Wordpress.com a highly successful SaaS and the open source portion is a secondary thought because it isn't profit driven. In any case, this could turn out to be a massive disaster for Wordpress. As a long time Wordpress developer, I am highly concerned. I think it has tons of potential if one right...but the handling of it has been shady, at best.

<comment><USER3> Accessibility has been worked on since the beginning of Gutenberg. If "Automattic" just wanted to be more competitive or operate for its own commercial benefit, it would have been 10x easier and faster to just do Gutenberg on WordPress.com and not do it core-first. Gutenberg being in core means every WordPress host in the world (that all compete with Automattic) will get access to it. It's not proprietary, it's open source. It works with all the plugins and themes out there. It works with the hundreds of billions of posts that have been written in the past 15 years of WordPress. It's community-first.

<comment><USER2> That's just false. Just because it's open source doesn't mean Automattic doesn't want to turn into a SqaureSpace model. There is no doubt in my mind that the pivot and ramming through of Gutenberg is because they are scared of things like SquareSpace and feel they need to evolve fast. They do need to evolve, but they also need to stop cutting corners and listen to the community...It won't be long (it might already be true) that the "Classic Editor" plugin will have more active installs than any other plugin in the repo. That's a LOUD message from the community that "this is not ready!" I have sites that are Gutenberg compatible but I still have the classic editor on, because it's a giant mess.

Gutenberg from my experience is a server hog compared to the classical Wordpress. It's harder on database servers and on memory. Yet they won't even change their PHP practices to make it 7+ requirement.

<comment><USER3> There's also facts: Gutenberg plugin adoption is growing faster than Classic Editor adoption, so it's not likely it will have more active installs than any other plugin. But even if it did, that's okay, we're supporting it. It's not a failing of Gutenberg, just showing that people for whatever reason don't want change.

AFAIK there is no change to database or memory usage post-Gutenberg, especially since pretty much all of the new code executes on the client side when you edit a post. It may use more memory in your browser, but not anything that should cause issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who has always loathed Wordpress and everything connected to it and its ecosystem, I've switched over a Wordpress install I—reluctantly—voluntarily maintain in my spare time, and been extremely pleasantly surprised.

I've worked with Wordpress a lot over the years, so I'm very familiar with its inner workings: this is what's largely motivated me to avoid it when possible, and unfortunately prevented me from contributing to the project.

Given my initial reaction to Gutenberg, I'm imagining the community at large will hate it. The Wordpress community is one that champions amateur, dangerous, big-ball-of-mud software development, under the guise of being "beginner friendly" (where "beginner" = "not experienced enough to be leading clients to believe they can provide professional-grade solutions"). This is a mindset that favours hacks and tech debt. over refactoring, and Gutenberg is definitely going to force both plugin and theme developers to rethink, and rewrite their approach (in a positive way, imo).

If it successfully brings Wordpress out of the dark-ages, that's great obviously. If it makes Drupal more pleasant and easy-to-use for editors: also nice. If it kills Wordpress due to its community migrating away, then at least it could leave room for some more modern competitor.

I just hope the core devs don't do a U-turn on Gutenberg.

<comment><USER5> In a word: ClassicPress.. The community is already migrating

<comment><USER6> I keep hearing folks say this, but it feels very astroturfed to me... I totally can be wrong about that feeling, but it's my feeling and I own it.

<comment><USER7> Ironic you mention the astroturfing, as the person you replied to is the creator of ClassicPress ;)

The creator likes to namedrop ClassicPress everywhere on the WP.org forums and WPTavern. He's had his posts removed from the wp.org forums due to spam too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm an active core-contributor to WordPress, and I maintain a core component (Privacy) currently.

Even within the core-contributor community, there is a lot of friction, particularly with the "less popular" components. Accessibility was the first to snap, with the lead resigning, but not after other big contributors took long breaks when needed most. BDFL Matt hasn't helped heal the fractures and has hurt even more components since. The Privacy component, for example, was the butt of a joke during his WordCamp Europe keynote, boiling down our efforts over the past year as asking users to take cookies, which hurt Privacy team morale (the Privacy team primarily worked on creating a standardized way in the core to identify and export personal data, and help people create Privacy Policies by standardizing how plugins can identify what data they collect).

The largest issue is React -- it's so different than the rest of the WordPress core, that 90% of the core developers can't work on Gutenberg issues. WordPress is primarily PHP, and if JS is used, most places jQuery is the framework of choice. It's dated, but it works quite well still. React is quite the departure from all of those technologies, and will cause gigantic rifts in the community. I do believe WordPress will survive, but with thousands of plugins lost forever due to lack of updating.

<comment><USER9> Component approach is good, but why force everyone to use React or any particular framework? Wouldn't it be better to implement this as vanilla js component? Either via web component or just plain custom element.

Nowdays there are some really good solutions like quillJS or prosemirror that are not tied to particular solutions.

<comment><USER10> It's the WYSIWYG in the admin and you can still opt out to use TinyMCE. AFAIK, the front-end of Wordpress isn't using React.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yet.

<comment><USER10> Even if they were to make the default theme based on React, nobody is using it. Everyone switch to something else right after install.

Should they change the entire stack to use React, they would lose a lot of their community. A lot of their users are code novices that make do with simple HTML and some PHP snippets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think Gutenberg solves the wrong problem for Wordpress. I don't think that many people were crying out for a fancier way to store giant messy blobs in MySQL.

Why does someone select Wordpress in 2018? Why even host a website at all? Because they want to build something custom. But because Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine, anything fancy has to get implemented as custom code and/or super powerful themes and plugins that are almost like mini CMSs unto themselves. This is where a lot of the security problems in Wordpress sites often come from, BTW.

IMO Wordpress could do a lot more for itself long term by improving the flexibility and power of its core, rather than its WYSIWYG.

<comment><USER12> I'm sort-of leaving tech, but I've worked in web dev for 8 years, and this is the first I hear of Gutenberg.

From what I understand, it's better WYSIWYG. Great, but we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. Alright but people want WYSIWYG!

To me, this seems like a manifestation of the limits inherent to the simplification of UI. The frontend _needs_ complex information to be able to correctly produce a beautiful design. Ultimately, the user needs to be aware of the concepts (too complex, apparently), or the design needs to be automated and therefore simplistic. WYSIWYG is the unhappy compromise demonstrating that consistency begets complexity.

If this dilemma really is unsolvable, then Wordpress is but one of iteration in a grand cycle of its victims. I worked mainly with Drupal, and the situation there isn't much better, they've simply opted for sophistication over usability.

<comment><USER13> > Great, but we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage

Markdown is great and all, I personally use it mostly for README docs and git tracking. But WYSIWYG is what most blog sites are embracing

Examples (but not limited to)

\- Medium

\- Ghost → Ghost 2.0

\- Webflow + Design tools

\- Notion + Notetaking tools

\- Premade website tools (WIX, squarespace, Shopify Page Builder, etc) are gaining ground over wordpress traditionally

WYSIWYG has a learning curve associated with it, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Personally, I prefer GUI tools over non GUI counterparts anyhow. These include tools in atom/visual studio code for doing git commits / branching etc.

People are more than willing to learn how to use a WYSIWYG interface if the value they get long term is worth it. Ideally, cost should be minimized (learning) and benefits maximized(building quick blog posts how they want). Blogs are _exactly_ that though, you spend a little bit of time learning the framework, and spend a lot of time using it. The amount a user is willing to learn proportional depends how much they will use it long term.

For a one off task, a user is not willing to spend as much time learning a WYSIWYG GUI tool, and would rather pick something more familiar like markdown or .txt. Examples include learning how to use a new video editing tool, with advanced feature sets (Adobe Premiere, etc) if you don't make videos often. Rather you would prefer learning a simpler tool instead (Adobe spark, etc)

From research I've done the market is largely shifting towards WYISWYG and from a UX research standpoint, this makes sense. Getting exactly what you want lowers the barrier and confusion / expectations of what you receive.

You can quote buzzfeed essays all day, but I always take research with a grain of salt unless (1) the author is reputable (2) it validates research and data I've observed from a number of various reputable sources / my own research. UX is just common sense at the end of the day

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> The frontend needs complex information to be able to correctly produce a > beautiful design

Not necessarily true, just use a CSS framework and it simplifies a lot of the process. Take your pick with functional CSS like tailwinds, bootstrap, or just modify your own classes. WYISYWG just wraps things in classes as necessary

I've looked at Gutenburg, it looks promising. I've spoken to a number of core devs from gutenburg. I don't really like the tinyMCE editor that much honestly, or the Jetpack installed wordpress.com instance. They both have issues. TinyMCE editor doesn't reflect proper nominal width for a blog at ~800px, so sometimes the results are skewed when previewed live

Jetpack wordpress.com's editor is more closer to what optimal words per line / font-size / width to write should be. However, it has some serious flaws when using 3rd party plugins (such as adding prismJS code snippets) and its a pain to work with

<comment><USER14> "UX is just common sense at the end of the day."

Oh boy would you be surprised. The whole reason we do research is because users consistently break our expectations, in the most uncommon ways.

<comment><USER3> +1000

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having trialled the new offering thanks to a banner in my Wordpress dashboard, I went right back to the old editor. Trouble with the new one is the UX is hostile - everything needs an extra dozen clicks for the most simple things.

I want to publish a post about as fast as writing a text or word doc. The current wordpress editor is unexciting but has a fairly decent workflow. Faffing about with everything on a pulldown or modal is not progress.

A fair summary of my views of Gutenberg:

[https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress- gutenberg.html](https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html)

<comment><USER16> It may need a few extra click for simple things. But it makes slightly more complex things _much_ simpler

<comment><USER17> But most of the time one does simple things. Hurting the common case to improve a rare case is rarely a good tradeoff.

<comment><USER18> The common case for wordpress hasn't been just blogging for quite some time now. The common case is brochure sites for businesses. I wouldn't be surprised to find that writing a simple blog post is actually the rare use case these days.

<comment> at-fates-hands This is the Achilles heel of Wordpress.

WP is now getting a a TON of competition from static site generators, and companies like Netlify. Headless CMS' and Jamstack are the future for these types of sites and people are coming off of Drupal and Wordpress in huge numbers.

As their numbers have shrunk, they've had to make drastic changes. I haven't been seriously involved in the WP community for about five years, but I've heard rumblings within the community about moving to a modern stack that includes ReactJS or VueJS for a while now.

At the very least they're trying to maintain their position and modernize WP to appease some of the critics and vocal members of their community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like it. About 9 months ago I started working on a plugin for my workplace to turn the platform into a logbook for our researchers, and got to build from scratch for the new platform, so to be fair I am not experiencing any of my prior work breaking, but I do like what I see.

Adding extra behaviour to the classic editor is fragile, especially if the feature involves adding or changing something about an existing part of the UI. Gutenberg makes this relatively simple, and at least provides a blessed way of doing this (via plugins), whereas before you relied on the structure of the editor's HTML not changing and breaking your stuff.

Furthermore, everything is retrieved and sent via the REST API which seems like a great approach: it means you can reuse your plugin logic for other parts of the site, and in principle the new editor can be bolted on to some other non-Wordpress projects with only a few adaptions, and WordPress itself may one day be implemented in something other than PHP.

One other thing I like is the ease of use of Gutenberg. While it takes a few extra clicks for things, novices won't care about that, and having more visual clues will really help them. Plus, the blocks now give you a way to make things truly WYSIWYG, especially shortcodes which are otherwise just short strings that only generate their content when you preview the page. Now it's possible to make blocks instead of shortcodes that render whatever needs rendered in the editor.

I guess Automattic could have handled the development better, and given more time for the update to be tested and for the community to be informed and give their feedback. In 2017 they kept saying they'd release it in early 2018, which has come and gone, so I can't help but think they're pushing this out in a desperate bid to hit their original deadline at least in terms of the year. That part might bite them later, especially if there are any huge bugs yet to be discovered.

</comment><comment><USER20> I used it for a recent WP site and found it quite intuitive to use. The generated code is clean, and it integrates well with shortcodes and third- party content. I generally prefer code view to WYSIWYG, but it's one of the nicer editors I've used.

I found some of the keyboard shortcuts to be unintuitive. Toggling between code and visual modes required four button presses. Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y.

Overall though I think it's a positive change. I hope that Gutenberg manages to kill all those awful page builder plugins like WPBakery and Visual Composer. That would make me happy.

<comment><USER21> > Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y.

I am always confused which shortcut to use for Redo on Windows. Microsoft software is Ctrl+Y but I must've grown up using software that chose Ctrl+Shift+Z as that's what I always try first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Commented a couple times here, but we've been making a concerted effort to inform past clients of the coming of Gutenberg.

It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg is coming.

We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make the transition.

We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked around or refactored.

The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a case by case basis.

[1][https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg](https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg)

</comment><comment><USER23> I work at an agency building large websites for a variety of clients, and so far am in love with Gutenberg. The block based approach is huge, especially for many of our clients in the news and editorial space that write long pieces of content with a lot of different components (text and images of course, but also quotes, asides, interactive embeds, donations, related stories, etc).

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is a year old. Does anyone know the current status of the Gutenberg release? Article says first half of 2018 and we are well past that.

<comment><USER22> The 1st beta of WordPress 5.0 was released today (which includes Gutenberg). Outside of discovering any major blockers, the current plan is to release 5.0 on November 19.

<comment><USER25> 3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me nervous.

<comment><USER22> You can still opt-out by installing the Classic Editor plugin[1]. That will disable Gutenberg and let you keep the current experience.

[1][https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic- editor/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/)

<comment><USER26> There's also this plugin which removes all other references to Gutenberg so if you're building sites for clients they aren't able to accidentally switch the classic editor off, and don't get nag screens about trying Gutenberg. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor- addon/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got into WP to build a site that tracks robot teams and competition events. I didn't want to write PHP but found a great plugin called PODS. It allowed me to do all the inter-page linkage (orgs->teams->robots) without any PHP. Another plugin does calendar stuff for the events.

It was quick and easy to set it up, and works pretty smoothly.

I've tried Gutenberg and wasn't that impressed. It wasn't adding to anything I was doing and it managed to break two small items.

I know that the WP people are trying to go against Wix, etc. I'd like to have also seen them split into the new React and kept the "classic". I'll most likely become one of the 1000's of sites that become frozen on a 4.9.x release. It will be interesting to see if there are updates in the 4.9 tree or if it will be 5.0 only.

I look at the Wix, Weebly, etc market place has being worth WP going after and I'm sure they will try to pull company/vendor sites from the Facebook and I'm good with that. But one of the powers of WP is the ability to make pretty complex sites using PHP/Plugins. Moving to React isn't going to make that easy.

I really think that this is a case of dumbing down a product may not be a good idea for lots of the current users.

</comment><comment><USER28> I did not know that their motto is:

> _'Clean, Lean, and Mean'_

And even after double-checking, I can only assume it's somewhat outdated, or outright irony. Because while I consider WP among the software that has done the most good over the last few decades, those three words really don't come to mind when trying to describe it.

Of course at the time it came out it's immediate comparisons where these $7-digit behemoths being sold to Fortune 500 companies, and it probably did not rely on plugins as much as it does now. So I can see how clean & mean made sense at the time.

<comment><USER29> I think they mean the core is clean, lean and mean. The reality is that most people will use themes, customisations of themes and a stack of plugins so what you end up with on disk is none of the above.

Most of us never have to touch the core though.

<comment><USER30> The core is a mess too. And they refuse to modernize their code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The way data is stored is very frustrating. Storing what should be json as html so it could try to be backwards compatible.

I made a library[1] to make blocks so I've been using Gutenberg a few months. Feels like it could be really really nice if a few changes were made. I commend the WP community for making it though.

Big issues are with trying to make more than just a few blocks, the editor really doesn't enforce and code splitting. So unless you're using a library like the one I created, having let's say, 100 blocks is going to mean an insane amount of JS on page load. Also, good luck trying to debug the stack traces you'll get in browser. I could go on but the point is: Gutenberg is a nice idea but real projects will find issues.

[1] [https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock](https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock)

</comment><comment><USER3> Howdy — lead of WordPress here. When the article was written in January of 2018, I would agree Gutenberg wasn't ready for core. Ten months later, it's come a long way. _There have been 41 public releases of Gutenberg, and close to 600,000 sites are using it already._ It's the mostly widely tested (and adopted) new feature code we've had in any release of WordPress in my memory. It might not be for everyone, which is why we created the Classic Editor plugin which you can install today, and when 5.0 comes out in a few weeks your site will look and work pretty much exactly like it does today, and you can migrate to Gutenberg at your leisure, or perhaps not at all. (There are lots of ways to post and interact with WordPress, including the command line via wp-cli.)

A big advantage of blocks is they will allow us to simplify many of the different concepts and interfaces throughout WordPress, including our old WYSIWYG sorta-blocks, shortcodes, widgets, menus, and embeds of all types. It solves literally hundreds of interactions where people used to get stuck in our old WYSIWYG and either switch to code view to fix things, or just give up. Like all software, the 5.0 release of WordPress isn't a finish line, it's a starting one. We are already planning for 5.1 and beyond (including minimum PHP updates) and we look forward to bringing the fast, public iteration cycle that Gutenberg has demonstrated to more parts of core.

<comment><USER8> Hey Matt! I'm not denying the massive amount of testing and effort going into Gutenberg, as I do see it. I am however worried about the new block editor hurting the good reputation WordPress has, particularly in regards to accessibility.

Hacker News isn't the right place for this discussion, I know, but I want to get it out there. Accessibility is one of the best features of WordPress, even if most people don't know about it. Keeping the WordPress editor accessible not only helps people with disabilities, as it also aids people who may have a temporary ailment (holding their baby, and just having one hand available, for example), or even "invisible" disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, or an Autism Spectrum disorder.

The new block editor has made tremendous strides at improving individual component's accessibility recently, and I believe that's where the confusion and miscommunication comes in between all the core teams. Code-wise, the block editor is quite accessible; zoomed out, the editor as a whole isn't. It's a UX issue, more than a development one. It's what happens when the design isn't with accessibility in mind.

I don't think it's worth punting release, but I really would like to see more work on documentation and warnings in the core to people who rely on assistive technologies. If you don't know the layout of the block editor and had to navigate it with only a keyboard and no eyesight, it's incredibly confusing! If there was proper documentation, you might be able to explain the layout and mechanics, which would help, though still not solve all the problems.

If someone is blind and has a blog, in my experience, 90% of them use WordPress because it's very friendly to them when they want to write. It's not a fair comparison, as TinyMCE merely is a glorified text-field, but that's also one of the old selling points of WordPress -- super simple out of the box.

It's my understanding that a lot of the preliminary design for Gutenberg was behind closed doors inside of Automattic, before publicly being brought out to the public and collaboration ensued. I don't believe there is anything wrong with this, as it happens within many FLOSS projects by corporate interests that rely on the platform. I do though wish that in the initial design phase, accessibility was a goal, not an afterthought. It may have been a goal too, not denying that, but there might have been a lack of expertise in regards to how to make interfaces fully accessible.

I don't mean to attack the editor, Automattic, or you about this. I know you've heard a lot about it. I love the block editor; it's such a pleasant experience for me to use. I worry that people though who aren't as able-bodied as I won't feel the same though.

Finally, I have a hunch that Automattic itself has now found that it needs expertise on Accessibility, which is why there's this: [https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer- accessi...](https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer- accessibility/)

I do believe in WordPress.org, and I love Automattic as a company and their stance in regards to the open web. I like that Automattic is a company built on my personal-favorite legal document, the GNU GPL. I'm looking forward to the day that the block editor is accessible, as it's not now. I do believe it will be. I only wish there was a stronger push before :)

<comment><USER3> The best read about Accessibility in Gutenberg is here:

[https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/18/regarding- accessi...](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/18/regarding- accessibility-in-gutenberg/)

Accessibility has been thought about from the beginning, and no design happened behind closed doors (it was kicked off and announced at WCUS 2016), but we are doing a fundamentally more complex task with block manipulation.

I'm not sure what the best path forward is there. We'll continue to make the block editor friendlier to accommodate accessibility needs, and I also think it's important that WordPress has a variety of ways to post to it, from email, to other apps, to the command line... by supporting as we always have a ton of ways to get content in and out of WordPress it'll allow people to use the interface they enjoy the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was thinking of another Gutenberg: [https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg](https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg) / [https://getgutenberg.io](https://getgutenberg.io)

It's a static site generator.

<comment><USER33> I am going to change name for the next release because of the confusion though!

<comment><USER34> And miss out on the free discovery?

<comment><USER33> Not really free discovery when every search will be about the WordPress editor or Project Gutenberg and a static site generator will be on page 3-4 :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Background: Had a walkthrough demo and code dive at our PHP group a few months ago. One of the guys in our coworking space runs a WP user group. I've used WP for some projects for years. I like it for small to medium content, but have hated doing large "dev" projects on it (ecommerce, etc)

Gutenberg thoughts: It's seemed to me that much of WP success in the last several years has been driven by the ecosystem of page/theme builders, which have been built around serving various verticals. They've solved a core problem of not having easy baked-in structured data management, and Gutenberg looks like it's a first step in standardizing that. It seems the tools community will need to adapt to that, which they might, but it also seems like it might be taking away some of their value-add, and there may not be enough room higher-up the chain to add value.

I don't know if there's a huge reason for some of the theme/page services to rush to support the upgraded 5.x series; if it makes it easier to switch to a competitor... will they have much incentive?

This is certainly a shift in the WP world, but it feels like it's at a point where they could lose a chunk of users to competitors. For a lot of other users, though... where would they go? As with many upgrades, if the pain is too much for not much value, that's a time when people would consider other options more seriously.

</comment><comment><USER36> I did end up at the Boston wordcamp conference where one of the Gutenberg developers was speaking as the keynote.

Like the article says: They see for-profit site builders: squarespace, wix ... as eating Wordpress market share and feel a need to advance Wordpress to make it competitive. They know it's risky but they see it as an important way to stay relevant.

Wordpress users seem on board with this. A lot of them aren't developers and want easier solutions to hand their clients.

(Except the guy with the "Gutenberg not in core t short"

</comment><comment><USER37> Gutenberg allows to write structured documents just like you should do with a word processor.

I can imagine many people having trouble to adapt because they are not familiar with using styles and templates.

I was not familiar with Gutenberg and was offered to activate it a few months ago. I did so and manage to make it work for me.

I consider that writing structured documents is part of personal advancement in IT and should be viewed as such.

</comment><comment><USER38> I got scared from the title because I thought that project Gutenberg[1] had died or something

[1][https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

<comment><USER39> What an incredible shame that would be! I just hope that we can get some copyright reform someday, at least for non-Disney entities. It's absurd that it can be easier to find a bestseller from 1850 than one from 1950.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This article was published in Jan 10, 2018; what's the current state of Gutenberg?

<comment><USER22> Gutenberg has been progressing on GitHub. It just got merged into the beta version of WP 5.0 release today, which is slated for general release on November 19.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love the Gutenberg interface.

However, I also think Automattic has made life for themselves much, much harder by fragmenting the code base like this. WordPress was always monolithic in its approach, and trying to tack on a (newer, more modern, but still wholly different) core component is a major risk.

I'm working on a migration plan to some other platform as part of our business continuity plan. The stability of WordPress was its biggest selling feature. Now, that will no longer exist.

</comment><comment><USER26> We build sites with complex data structures on WordPress using CMB2 for custom fields. I think Gutenberg has its place, but if you want to build anything of any real size you're going to need data structures (i.e. content types with defined relationships), and Gutenberg doesn't allow that. It's an odd kind of structured layout tool that I think will confuse a lot of people.

For all their faults (which are less and less as it develops), WYSIWYG fields using TinyMCE have the massive advantage that they look like the word processors that most people are familiar with. Beyond small personal blogs I just don't think Gutenberg adds any value, and if anything muddies the water for site editors if you're using structured data _and_ Gutenberg.

We've taken the decision to disable Gutenberg entirely and just use custom fields so we can maintain stable data structures, rather than trying to crowbar that into Gutenberg somehow. All you need to do is only use custom post types without the "editor" capability, hide the Posts menu item, and define everything through CMB2 custom fields.

<comment><USER42> I build Django sites often based around TinyMCE and this is my experience. If you've got a blob of content then drop in an MCE field but the minute you're dealing with structured data - WYSIWYG often makes things more complex.

TinyMCE really is quite extensible and flexible if you keep to it's sweet spot. It can produce fairly clean and consistent markup based on a whitelist of elements - which is critical if you're storing HTML directly in a database field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I thought this article was pretty insightful, regarding Gutenberg and Automattic's response to the open source community: [https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of- cms](https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms)

And since then, these two troubling things have happened:

Oct 9, Accessibility team lead resigns over Gutenberg - [https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead- resig...](https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resigns- cites-political-complications-related-to-gutenberg)

Oct 17, Accessibility audit canceled, because the new accessibility team lead "didn't have the authority to authorize it in the first place" \- [https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit- postponed...](https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed- indefinitely)

</comment><comment><USER44> I get that Automattic wants to compete with Wix, etc, but throwing the Wordpress community and ecosystem under the bus is not the way to go.

Gutenberg has its place in the web dev world of 2018 but it should have been a completely new project instead of a replacement of good old Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER45> The thing that really concerns me with WordPress and Gutenberg is performance. Gutenberg is great but there is never much concern to making the front-end less top heavy. Gutenberg is likely to make this worse. Each block will add it's own CSS and JS...and the bloat will be immense. Instead of users adding a single page builder plugin, they'll add a whole bunch of individual blocks and each one will load more and more external scripts. PageSpeed scores will be dismal.

<comment><USER3> Blocks need not do that, and most should be no more overhead than what people were already doing in posts. Perhaps is a big focus though, but one that's been easier to address outside of core with things like expanded CDN support in the latest version of Jetpack Photon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like the Gutenberg approach a lot.

Maybe it still requires some polishing but I think that people don't like it mostly because it is something new and they are not used to it yet.

</comment><comment><USER47> Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress.

On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is still no viable alternative. So many projects on Indiehackers start on wordpress still. There is still no customizable, verstaile alternative for wordpress in spite of its many failings.

If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

<comment><USER35> > If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast > has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems WP has.

If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing 'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many) others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the "it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the problems we see.

<comment><USER48> To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up.

What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?

<comment><USER35> i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems.

Paid support from some plugin vendors _always_ ends up with "disable all plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking.

Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins, that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever, you should have started over, you're exaggerating" \- some combination of those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12 weren't actively used.

When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor" path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations.

If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with?

If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really.

Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart?

Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because 'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end, which is often a selling point for WP/woo work.

No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need something simple that's not magento".

Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already 'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out. But don't color too far outside the lines.

<comment><USER49> This...

For a WordPress only site, half a dozen plugins for specific functionality is what I aim for.

But WooCommerce, they pile up really quickly just for core requirements like payment gateways, a quickview, wishlist: Things that are core or would be baked into the theme in Magento.

62, wow. I flip out if they had half that. Usually they're running some sort of cruddy backup system, multiple security plugins because they got hacked previously (not surprised) and a dozen plugins that they don't need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Great points, I do believe any software has a lifecycle and WordPress is at the end of the road. Curious to see if Getneberg can change this situation.

</comment><comment><USER51> What are the economic opportunities for React developers with Gutenberg?

</comment><comment><USER52> It would appear that I'm the only one reading this who uses TypePad (since 2004). True, it's clunky, unchanging, and very slow — but that translates to ease of use and reliability.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is a step in the right direction. -someone that stopped using WordPress when porn started appearing automatically in random folders because the view tech is php

</comment><comment><USER54> Writing as an English coder ie I code in the English language so that the human compiler can parse what I write aka more of a hack than a hacker.

Wordpress.org appeals to hackers, but Wordpress.com appeals to hacks. No tech support needed, no 3am beepers because a badly behaved plugin wet the bed.

So I am happy that Wordpress is slow to intro new software. Make it work and make it intuitive. Wordpress is the least annoying tech vendor - like Apple in their best days (not now sadly). Not perfect - who is? Would like better wysiwyg editing. But bigger beef is search. It sucks. I use Google to find info on my own site.

<comment><USER55> You might like to try [https://searchwp.com](https://searchwp.com) if you're hosting your own site (it wasn't quite clear from your comment).

It lets you tweak search results by giving different weights to titles, categories, excerpts, and more. I'm not affiliated, but if the default search is no good on your site it might help you get the results you expect instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> A bit of history:

Up till 2004, the king of all blog software was Moveable Type, written in Perl. In theory, you had to pay for this, but there was a liberal free license. Then in 2004 they got strict and said, hey, everyone has to pay.

This set off a movement to find another free blog software package. For awhile it seemed like there were roughly a million blog software packages, written in different languages. PHP was easy to learn, so it gained traction. Blossom was big, Typo was big. Then WordPress gained traction.

During the long era when other blog software was dying, and WordPress was emerging as the clear winner, the success of WordPress was driven by the understanding of BDFL Matt that designers loved it. It worked well with software such as Dreamweaver. People came to PHP because it was easy to learn, and so WordPress should also be easy to learn. Because of this, Matt insisted that WordPress stick with PHP 4, rather than PHP 5, for many years. I believe PHP 5 had been around for 6 or 7 years before WordPress began using it. I believe Matt was worried that the Object Oriented ideas in PHP 5 would be difficult for newcomers to learn.

I believe the decision to stick with easy-to-learn PHP 4 was essential to the success that WordPress enjoyed during that era.

Which is why I am so surprised by Gutenberg. Telling the whole community that they need to learn React is a shocking change of tactics. Instead of focusing on easy-to-learn, WordPress suddenly wants to become best-of-breed? That is a different niche in the ecosystem of CMSs. Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW.

React radically increases the amount that new developers will have to learn to become proficient with WordPress. And if you're asking developers to radically increase their investment, then suddenly they are going to consider other options, such as Ruby On Rails. If WordPress suddenly becomes one of those frameworks that needs 2 years of hard study before you really understand it, then maybe you should be learning some other framework during those 2 years? Because there is also a lot of ugliness and technical debt in WordPress, things that made sense when the focus was "make life easy for designers" but which don't make sense if the goal is "be the best framework."

I was around in 2001 when PHP-Nuke decided to go down a similar road. The decision was made that it would be refactored into a series of components, each of which would have an elegant interface for interacting with the other components. PHP-Nuke was going to clean up its technical debt, become more secure, adopt best practices. But previously it had been playing the role of "easiest way to set up a blog or forum". It gave up one role and tried to become something else completely. It self-destructed. Two years later it was dead, no one was using it.

It seems to me that WordPress is going down the same road as PHP-Nuke. Obviously WordPress is a much bigger community than PHP-Nuke ever was, but it seems like it is making the same kind of mistake. I thought Matt was extremely wise for sticking with PHP 4 for so long, but Gutenberg seems like the kind of mistake he would have been making if he'd adopted PHP 5 too soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW._

This is the heart of it.

To extend the analogy further, they actually could take a page from the car industry. When Toyota and Honda and Nissan wanted to move from the value-for- money segment into the luxury-car segment, they invented new brands for those luxury products (Lexus, Acura and Infiniti, respectively) instead of trying to convince people that "Toyota" and "Honda" and "Nissan" stood for something different today than they did yesterday. And this strategy has been quite successful, letting them grow into a new market without undercutting their hard-won position in the old one.

<comment><USER57> Very good insight. WP should take your words to heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The only way to "save" WordPress is to destroy it. The core was not written before PHP had classes, but the project chose to maintain backwards compatibility with a project that was. It's the worst popular codebase, and as this shows, it can't be modernized without changing it into something fundamentally different.

</comment><comment><USER59> tbh, ive moved away from Wordpress, I find it too bloated for my needs. I been experimenting with Jekyll, and think eventually ill move over to Hugo.

</comment><comment><USER60> anyone have a sense whether this frontend could be decoupled from the php backend ?

<comment><USER61> Would love to know as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> WordPress is having their "Thesis 2" moment. Ironic, really.

</comment><comment><USER63> Have tried it? It's really buggy. The head of UX quit because of the amount of bugs.

Not only technical bugs, the UI is poorly designed.

<comment><USER64> I thought it was the lead of accessibility, Rien Rietveld, who quit?

The article announcing Riet's resignation is [https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the- word...](https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress- accessibility-team/) (Working at time of writing this comment)

<comment><USER65> After reading resignation you've linked... That's no way to lead an innovation. Especially for such a big FOSS project.

Automattic's position of quite verbally "throwing" Gutenberg at users and developers at any cost just shows a really bad example of business driven FOSS project as a base for commercial product (.org for .com).

A11y is just one of the victims. Other community members creating WordPress based websites, services and plugins (myself included) are mostly thrown overboard as a collateral damage. Either learn react fast and figure Gutenberg out by yourself or maybe we'll let you come back later _if and when_ we get to work at least on some documentation and the well-known issues that affect you. With Gutenberg's extensibility being the biggest and most harming one for WP ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's the end, but it would have died anyway. While WordPress's success is amazing, it's still a pile of PHP that requires constant diligence to keep it running safely.

I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported and everything else sucks even worse....

<comment><USER67> > I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely > supported and everything else sucks even worse....

So how is it the end if everything else sucks? Maybe they are stumbling here with Gutenberg (I haven't tried it or even researched it much), but it seems far from the end.

I still don't expect anything to overtake WP. A big reason is that too many agencies rely on it at this point, they aren't going to want to switch to anything else. Also for lower budget clients, pitching anything other than WP is a hard sell these days, as an increasing amount of non tech-savvy users are familiar with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Gutenberg converts tasks that used to take 2-3 clicks into 10-20 click tasks, or even worse makes them impossible altogether.

What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot.

But are there any real alternatives?

<comment><USER69> _What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot._

Well, insulting hyperbole certainly isn't going to help.

From what I can tell (I haven't used Wordpress in a long time, so I didn't know about this), the main complaint is it's more touch-optimized, and as a result desktop editing with trackpad/mouse is more complex.

That's a fair criticism, but not a conclusive argument against. If the most common use case for non-technical users is a touch interface, then making that the default, and giving highly-technical users who prefer the old editor a way to swap back to it... seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and one that should be made on the basis of user research and usage stats, not on the basis of people who sling insults and leave 1-star reviews on a plugin marketplace.</comment></comment>


Scratchpad: Rapid prototyping from UI elements you clip/collect from the web - <AUTHOR> http://scratchpad.co

<comment><USER2> I think people are taking the lean startup method of throwing a landing page up to gain intrest a little too far, this feels quite deceiving and to be honest has annoyed me that oh.. I'm just signing up to a mailing list and have to actually invite my friends to be 'front of the line'.. makes me feel like nothing has actually being built at all apart from a pretty landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the designer/developer behind this I promise you plenty is being build, we'll be ready to start inviting people to use it in the next couple of days.

Sorry to have annoyed you, but there's really no better way to gauge interest/insight into what your doing early than this type of approach, it really does work out for the better in the long run.

<comment><USER2> "Sign up & Get Started Now!"

Thats exactly what your call to action says.. but thats blatantly a lie.. It gives the expectation of instant access.

"Sign up to learn more, Coming Soon, Be the first to know"

all alternative CTA's that are less deceitful.

<comment><USER3> I agree that based on the CTA you're expecting to go directly into the app, but to be fair that's the bottom CTA (I never saw it as it was below the fold of my screen).

Instead of taking the negative route, you could just tweet about it and ask for early access...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can do this today with the <http://easel.io> chrome extension.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deejobgbijaihniifc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deejobgbijaihniifcoinjfaagfmnnap)

It uses html/css, so you can even edit the things you import.

</comment><comment><USER5> How are people gushing about this service in the comments when it's not even released/available -_-

I got so excited, signed up, and then nothing :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, as was noted below the CTA was a little misleading, I've updated it since—nothing sinister was meant by it, just trying to gain insight into what people want as we put the finishing touches on the app, you should get an email in the next couple of days to start using it

<comment><USER6> What was the CTA before? Right now it says "Get Started Now" which is clearly not the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> It says "Signup and Learn More" now, took a few minutes for the update to propagate

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >"Sign up and get started now!" I register, and then nothing. Isn't this tool already released?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, guess some of the release text made it into the beta signup, we'll have a working app ready in the next day or so, if you signup i'll make sure you get first access—promise!

<comment><USER7> Alright. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did you get the idea for this from that one footnote to Bret Victor's recent essay? If so, that's some impressive turnaround time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I wish I could say I was that fast, although the whole thing's still very much in it's infancy sadly my turnaround time isn't quite that quick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love the idea but isn't this the same thing as using command+shift+ctrl+4 and then pasting into a photoshop document?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's similar yes (and partly what it's based on, i've been doing just that for years), but not everyone has photoshop (or wants to go through the effort of screenshot-ing and organizing their clippings on their hard drive

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I couldn't help but realize the remarkable design similarities to <http://www.blogic.com>. I'm curious if it inspired you.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, some definite similarities, but no hadn't seen that site until just now. It's actually based on another site design I'd done a few years ago: <http://yourboxseat.com/>

<comment><USER10> Darn, I was going to say I was flattered.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, happy to lie if it helps :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How different is this from easel.io?

<comment><AUTHOR> The biggest difference is there's no extension to install (not a big deal to most). Also, we're focused on non-designers being able to get their thoughts/likes across easy to designers.

That said, as a designer myself the Scratchpad process is largely based on an existing process I've employed for a while to get things going to show other's in a simple manner what i'm thinking and get early buy in to be able to move forward faster and on my own terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazing tool. This is the kind of thing you've always dreamed of finding.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome, but isn't it a copyright nightmare waiting to happen?

<comment><USER13> As long as you don't redistribute what you copy I can't imagine it being a problem. It looks to be meant for prototyping/wireframing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like signup is broken :( Love to test this new tool out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Odd, send me an email at andrew[at]scratchpad.co and I'd be happy to give you access when we have the tool live in the next day or two

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In IE8, the stylesheet does not load.

</comment><comment><USER16> Soooo excited about this!</comment>


Ask HN: Suggest names for an open-source, self-hosted Mailchimp alternative? - <AUTHOR> I have a tool that I use to send email campaigns. It integrates with AWS SES and sends these emails at a fraction of the cost. I am planning to open source it in the next couple of weeks.<p>Can this awesome community suggest some names that have available domains? I'm open to using the .email, .app, and .dev TLDs. <comment><USER2> Anzee. Build integrations so you could have a Mailchimp-anzee setup. If it's a company you're starting, think about the headlines: "Mailchimp-anzee merger".

Option 2:

"Howler". Since it blasts campaigns, campaigns are "howls" instead of "campaigns".

Also: Howler is a monkey that lives in the Amazon. Since you mentioned Amazon Web Services integration. It's a twist on mail _chimp_ and AWS.

If we want to be a bit douchey, we could drop some letters to get Howlr or Hwlr.

Option 3:

"Hermes", who is the " _the herald of the gods, as well as the protector of human heralds, travellers, thieves,[1] merchants, and orators._ "

Your users are the gods. The fact it sends messages for a fraction of the cost plays on merchants/thieves/travellers having a tight relation with money.

If not Hermes, then "Augur". Again, douchey: "Augr" or "Ogur".

Option 4:

"Colporteur" or "Colport": A colporteur is a peddler. A seller who goes around small villages or isolated places[your software reaches even the most isolated people] and screams to villagers or a place's inhabitants what's to sell/buy. Typically, the inhabitants, hearing the colporter's cries will go down and haggle/trade, buy or sell. These "screams" have a certain "rythm" and aren't disagreeable, which you can use as a metaphor for a "campaign" in your software.

Also known as a "Hawker", apparently from the Wikipedia entry.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are so well thought out!

It's funny you mention dropping some letters because my other project is AutoGradr :D

<comment><USER2> Just checked out [https://autogradr.com/](https://autogradr.com/). When I clicked on Signup, it went to [https://autogradr.app/signup](https://autogradr.app/signup). Is there a reason it's not in autogradr.com since you control the domain?

Also, it asked for my role with two choices "Instructor" or "Student". I'm paralysed, now because I could be an instructor for some, and a student for others. How will this dictate the future experience? Will I be able to switch roles? Will features of the one be unavailable for the other?

<comment><AUTHOR> \- No good reason really. I prefer having "app" in the URL and I was already using app.autogradr.com subdomain for an older version. During the migration, I had to keep both of them running so I opted to get the new domain.

\- That's a good point about the role. Surprisingly, it is not common for users to switch roles. I had punted this functionality until I would need it but even after a lot of usage, no one has requested for this feature. However, as an instructor you can get the "student" view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want mailslam.com I'll transfer it to you. I was going to build something similar but in reality I'll never get around to it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please make a show HN when you launch it. I'm currently a Sendy user but would love to find alternatives especially if they are not in PHP.

<comment><USER5> Not my project but this was posted on HN a while ago. Looked really good, built in Go.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421243)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> alphamail. electronilist. bullhorn. campaignking. untitledlist1. goodmail. emailotron. quicklist. emailist. senditall. postbag. carrierwave. deliverist. droplist. notspam. relimail. emailblast. firstcontact.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome! Definitely shortlisting senditall.email and droplist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> mailchamp</comment>