I'm surprised to see this kind of things here, of all places. I'm even more surprised to see all the positive comments (so far).
The most important feature of the periodic table of elements is that it is based upon some underlying structure of the elements. It was initially used to make predictions about the existence of elements that had not been found at the time.
The "true" Periodic Table was truly a stroke of genius, equivalent in many ways in coming up with a scientific model/theory to describe nature.
The "periodic" part refers to the fact that some properties reappear as move from element to element, from the lightest to the heaviest: this is related to the filling of the atomic orbitals and their effect on chemical properties.
There is absolutely nothing of the kind in this so-called "periodic table" or its various cousins (I have seen some for "design" and other topics). There is no hidden structure revealed, no predictive power to be made if one were to actually leave one of the squares unfilled. It takes a wonderful communication/organisation scientific tool, keeping only a superficial visual element and leaving all essential meaning behind.
As someone with a chemistry interest these thoughts mirror mine unironically, so I doubt this comment was a joke.
I think it's a fair reaction to be mildly annoyed when someone uses something within your field without any real understanding what it does.
After all, programmers are one of the first to point fingers and laugh when e.g. movies use random code snippets or wrong jargon. One of those "Periodic Table of X" things is basically the chemist equivalent of Saying "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the killer".
This website has a different purpose though, as many people note.
Why do you think they have no real understanding of what the periodic table does? This is a really silly reaction.
If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not).
It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name...
Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow.
I'm curious about that, too. I'm betting they are serious and just didn't get that it was a joke. As it stands I'm not quite sure I get the joke either, but it is kind of funny how useless an organization scheme this is since all the repos are unrelated and it's highly unlikely any one person would be looking for multiple element-named projects.
I think it'd be even funnier if the repos it links to weren't even named after elements, but just had names resembling the abbreviations or something. But then again, it would be hard to find some more useless grouping criterion than being named after an element... I wonder if it's actually worse than random :)
It's not an organization scheme in any practical sense. It's just a way of looking at all the repos named after elements and seeing which ones are still up for grabs, because naming things is hard so let's pick an element and name it that! But more than that, it's just a personal exercise and publishing something without getting caught up on weeks of perfecting it.
I get that these criticisms can be waved towards the "design" version and maybe others like this. This though, as far as I understand, only means to show that devs use "element names" as a naming device for their projects a lot. As such it isn't trying to copy the structural logic and purpose of the periodic table but only using it's design to in an intuitive way show which names has been used / how much of the table has been covered. I think it is interesting to see how bad the fantasy of dev are / which names you could use to be original :p
This was based on a joke at work. I'm sharing it because I have a serious problem with the "it's not perfect yet!" paralysis that causes nothing of mine to get completed. The goal was to hack something functional together and be okay with sharing it, despite the embarrassing code and the voice inside screaming at me that it's terrible.
Congrats on releasing and posting it here! Cheers to you getting over this paralysis. This is a neat project - I haven't looked at the code (and don't really plan to), but it works and that's good enough for me.
EDIT: I just looked at the code. It uses CSS grid - very cool! I'll be sure to use this as a reference.
No one picked lead?! AWWWW!! Poor old heavy, non-soaring, non-inspiring lead. Poor unglamorous, non-magical, non-shiny, inert lead. Old toxic, brain-damaging lead. Poor dull, dense, leaden, lead. The one every alchemist tried to turn into gold. The one every character in a Western movie had to eat. The one every character in a gangster movie had to get filled fulla.
The most important feature of the periodic table of elements is that it is based upon some underlying structure of the elements. It was initially used to make predictions about the existence of elements that had not been found at the time.
The "true" Periodic Table was truly a stroke of genius, equivalent in many ways in coming up with a scientific model/theory to describe nature.
The "periodic" part refers to the fact that some properties reappear as move from element to element, from the lightest to the heaviest: this is related to the filling of the atomic orbitals and their effect on chemical properties.
There is absolutely nothing of the kind in this so-called "periodic table" or its various cousins (I have seen some for "design" and other topics). There is no hidden structure revealed, no predictive power to be made if one were to actually leave one of the squares unfilled. It takes a wonderful communication/organisation scientific tool, keeping only a superficial visual element and leaving all essential meaning behind.