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I dig this idea. I have the sneaking suspicion that GitHub Gists aren’t a first-class citizen of the overall GitHub product. I tried navigating to mine the othe

I dig this idea. I have the sneaking suspicion that GitHub Gists aren’t a first-class citizen of the overall GitHub product. I tried navigating to mine the other day and found myself ejecting to a search engine to find them. And then wondering if they are something I can trust to be around in the future. I use Gists as a way to stash lists publicly. I’m curious what use cases for Gists exist beyond the obvious “here’s a snippet” (which is valuable in and of itself!).

simonw 2y ago
Yeah, Gists don't feel like they've had much attention in a very long time. I still love them as a product and use them on a daily basis, and there's nothing that feels particularly missing from them, but they're clearly not something GitHub are investing a lot of effort in beyond keeping them working at the moment.
- jjayj 2y ago
  I don't use gists. Haven't found a need I guess. If they work and there's nothing missing, what effort would they put into them?
  - dewey 2y ago
    Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it doesn’t get a „bug fixes and improvements“ update shipped every month.
    - lelanthran 2y ago
      > Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it doesn’t get a „bug fixed and improvement“ update shipped every month. Good point. Any new product should have $X bugs/month added by the current developers so that future developers can indicate 'signs of life' by fixing $Y bugs/month![1] TBH, once a product reaches whatever goal the founders set out to achieve, adding features can only make it worse, not better. Bugfixes, refinements? Sure. Extra features? Can only heighten the learning curve for newcomers in the future, even if the incremental learning curve added is small. [1] With suitable values for $X and $Y so that a project can show slow and steady improvement in reliability, until the inevitable rewrite 12 months later.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        Isn't it easier just to adjust the wording or typos in the comments so that it looks like activity without troubling yourself with actual changes to give the same look?
        jjayj 2y ago
        You could probably just release the same commit again with a different number.
      - groestl 2y ago
        > adding features can only make it worse, not better. There are exceptions, but software is usually part of a system, a social system. Successful software changes its environment, and in turn, the environment demands change from the software, which diligent maintainers attend to. It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned. As I said, there are exceptions (gists might be one of them).
        CRConrad 2y ago
        > It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned. Or just exceptionally well adapted to a stable social environment. Which might even be so stable precisely because the software is working so well that no changes to either software or social system -- business processes -- are required.
        groestl 2y ago
        Agreed, as you say it _exceptionally_ well adapted. Where the loop has basically reached a fixed point. As software is a relatively new phenomenon, maybe we'll reach a fixed point for most software in a few hundred years.
    - ashryan 2y ago
      I see what you mean here. I tend to agree that Gists seems relatively feature-complete (at least for my basic use case; I can’t speak for others). For my part, I’m reacting to Gists’ place in the overall GitHub UX. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels heavily implied that Gists aren’t part of the golden path.
doakes 2y ago
Val town has a cool idea of making gists runnable: https://www.val.town/ https://www.val.town/
- sdesol 2y ago
  At first I was like this interesting but I don't see this as more than a hobby project. Then I did some more reading and it turns out they recently raised 5.5M (seed round). I guess if they can become the next place for people to dump code for ML, I can see how they were able to raise.
  - RamblingCTO 2y ago
    Looks like they only support typescript, so ML is a stretch as of now. Sad, I was excited haha
    - bosch_mind 2y ago
      Check out Cloudflare Workers. Supports Python and has AI integrations
  - eddythompson80 2y ago
    I don’t know. These things make for very impressive demos and can raise a lot of interest, but the devil is always in the details. I’ve worked on a project like that before. Very simple editor, you put your code in, and it gives you an API endpoint. Wanna make a change? Just edit, hit save and it’s live. It was a great hit in all demos. Everybody loved it. Then developers actually started using it, and questions like “how do I do dependency management?”, “How do I split my code into multiple files?”, “How do I build my code?”, “What about Java/C#/Go/Python/etc?”, “How do I debug my code?”, “How do I use source control?”, “How do I integrate it into my CI/CD?”, “Can I deploy a container?”, “How do I manage multiple contributors and projects and access and dev/stage/prod?” Come up. You can see how they skirt around some of these questions. “Modern JavaScript” as in just import from npm or urls so they don’t have to worry about dependency management and putting lots of code in 1 file. Or writing a custom blob library to deal with storage. But the minute you need anything that needs a standard file system, network features, or anything any developer would expect to have, you run into a very steep cliff. You end up slowly needing to implement an IDE, a source control, a CI/CD system, a deployment pipeline, an offline experience, a monitoring story, and many things that are better implemented by many other products already.

simonw 2y ago

Yeah, Gists don't feel like they've had much attention in a very long time. I still love them as a product and use them on a daily basis, and there's nothing that feels particularly missing from them, but they're clearly not something GitHub are investing a lot of effort in beyond keeping them working at the moment.

jjayj 2y ago
I don't use gists. Haven't found a need I guess. If they work and there's nothing missing, what effort would they put into them?
- dewey 2y ago
  Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it doesn’t get a „bug fixes and improvements“ update shipped every month.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it doesn’t get a „bug fixed and improvement“ update shipped every month. Good point. Any new product should have $X bugs/month added by the current developers so that future developers can indicate 'signs of life' by fixing $Y bugs/month![1] TBH, once a product reaches whatever goal the founders set out to achieve, adding features can only make it worse, not better. Bugfixes, refinements? Sure. Extra features? Can only heighten the learning curve for newcomers in the future, even if the incremental learning curve added is small. [1] With suitable values for $X and $Y so that a project can show slow and steady improvement in reliability, until the inevitable rewrite 12 months later.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Isn't it easier just to adjust the wording or typos in the comments so that it looks like activity without troubling yourself with actual changes to give the same look?
      - jjayj 2y ago
        You could probably just release the same commit again with a different number.
    - groestl 2y ago
      > adding features can only make it worse, not better. There are exceptions, but software is usually part of a system, a social system. Successful software changes its environment, and in turn, the environment demands change from the software, which diligent maintainers attend to. It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned. As I said, there are exceptions (gists might be one of them).
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        > It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software is either unsuccessful or abandoned. Or just exceptionally well adapted to a stable social environment. Which might even be so stable precisely because the software is working so well that no changes to either software or social system -- business processes -- are required.
        groestl 2y ago
        Agreed, as you say it _exceptionally_ well adapted. Where the loop has basically reached a fixed point. As software is a relatively new phenomenon, maybe we'll reach a fixed point for most software in a few hundred years.
  - ashryan 2y ago
    I see what you mean here. I tend to agree that Gists seems relatively feature-complete (at least for my basic use case; I can’t speak for others). For my part, I’m reacting to Gists’ place in the overall GitHub UX. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels heavily implied that Gists aren’t part of the golden path.

doakes 2y ago

Val town has a cool idea of making gists runnable: https://www.val.town/ https://www.val.town/

sdesol 2y ago
At first I was like this interesting but I don't see this as more than a hobby project. Then I did some more reading and it turns out they recently raised 5.5M (seed round). I guess if they can become the next place for people to dump code for ML, I can see how they were able to raise.
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  Looks like they only support typescript, so ML is a stretch as of now. Sad, I was excited haha
  - bosch_mind 2y ago
    Check out Cloudflare Workers. Supports Python and has AI integrations
- eddythompson80 2y ago
  I don’t know. These things make for very impressive demos and can raise a lot of interest, but the devil is always in the details. I’ve worked on a project like that before. Very simple editor, you put your code in, and it gives you an API endpoint. Wanna make a change? Just edit, hit save and it’s live. It was a great hit in all demos. Everybody loved it. Then developers actually started using it, and questions like “how do I do dependency management?”, “How do I split my code into multiple files?”, “How do I build my code?”, “What about Java/C#/Go/Python/etc?”, “How do I debug my code?”, “How do I use source control?”, “How do I integrate it into my CI/CD?”, “Can I deploy a container?”, “How do I manage multiple contributors and projects and access and dev/stage/prod?” Come up. You can see how they skirt around some of these questions. “Modern JavaScript” as in just import from npm or urls so they don’t have to worry about dependency management and putting lots of code in 1 file. Or writing a custom blob library to deal with storage. But the minute you need anything that needs a standard file system, network features, or anything any developer would expect to have, you run into a very steep cliff. You end up slowly needing to implement an IDE, a source control, a CI/CD system, a deployment pipeline, an offline experience, a monitoring story, and many things that are better implemented by many other products already.