I originally made the “Code in the Browser” tool in my spare time, and I picked ACE because it seemed the dominant, best made and best supported Javascript code editor in 2013.

If there’s good reasons you don’t like it, you can fork the tool and change it to a different editor. Is there some particular thing you dislike about ACE?

Finally, yes, technology choices should often be made for social reasons. There’s no clear separation between the people and communities who make and maintain and know a technology, and it’s technical lines of code and features and usability.

For example, usable only means usable within the heads of its users, who already know certain things before they start. And code is no good if it isn’t improved and maintained.

Obviously, products can do new things, and train their users, and lead. However, generally amongst geeks too much attention is paid to that as if it is the only thing. In practice, as you know within Autodesk, people’s behaviours and organisational structures, are often more dominant in terms of delivering actual benefit to the world.

You have to hack those things too.

Was there a recallable conscious rationale for the choice of Ace, or did it fall out of the mixture this way by default, gut-feeling, group-think, like so many technology choices generally do.

In this case, it doesn’t make any difference, because the two are pretty much equivalent at this stage. However, such decisions do warrant deeper introspective retrospection to discover what was it that won out in favour of the one you didn’t use that couldn’t even get its brand straight. What exactly did they do to earn your trust, and can you get it in smokable form?

BTW your links to Scraperwiki Classic are broken. This doesn’t exist: http://classic.scraperwiki.bat/