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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#11

Post by tootie »

I feel like VS Code is on it's way to becoming the next generation of Eclipse. It's a great platform, but now it's practically just a plugin framework. I'm hoping the maturation of the open source world will have us not repeat the same mistakes.

Classic Eclipse plugins were all either created by big software vendors who wanted to create a good developer experience for their products or eager amateurs who were scratching an itch. VS Code plugins are more like good open source projects that have contributors and reviewers and frequently sponsors. Microsoft is strongly supporting it, but not with a heavy hand even if it cannibalizes some Visual Studio sales.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#12

Post by ethbro »

pikzel wrote: post #7

Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow. Which IDE will be the next big thing?

It's true often enough to beg a question. I wonder if trying to maintain divergent builds of an IDE (core + plugin/bloat) would actually make sense?

And then let the market give the company feedback on which it prefers.

My gut says architecture decisions to enable bloat would still affect the core release, but maybe not? The central issue seems to be disconnect with what the market wants.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#13

Post by JBReefer »

Still have no idea how to use Eclipse after 10 years. Vim, Emacs, VS Studio, VS Code, a few proprietary ones - very easy to figure out.

Eclipse seems to be a magical combination of hard to use, slow, and hated.

Was there a golden period? Was it great for awhile, and now is past it's prime, like MS Word?

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#14

Post by acomjean »

I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I'm maintaining some tomcat code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can't get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I donated.)

one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with 12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#15

Post by PeterStuer »

Being used to Visual Studio, every time I needed to use Eclipse I kept wondering how Java developers could tolerate such an environment. Now I know ofc some of it is due to less familiarity and exposure, but it realy felt like stepping back 15 years in time each time I launched it.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#16

Post by geezerjay »

pikzel wrote: post #7

Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow. Which IDE will be the next big thing?

It dependa on which language you'd want to use. Qt Creator does its job well for C++ although it does have a few kinks to iron out.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#17

Post by astura »

PeterStuer wrote: post #15

Being used to Visual Studio, every time I needed to use Eclipse I kept wondering how Java developers could tolerate such an environment. Now I know ofc some of it is due to less familiarity and exposure, but it realy felt like stepping back 15 years in time each time I launched it.

In what way?

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#18

Post by simion314 »

ethbro wrote: post #12
pikzel wrote: post #7

Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow. Which IDE will be the next big thing?

It's true often enough to beg a question. I wonder if trying to maintain divergent builds of an IDE (core + plugin/bloat) would actually make sense? And then let the market give the company feedback on which it prefers. My gut says architecture decisions to enable bloat would still affect the core release, but maybe not? The central issue seems to be disconnect with what the market wants.

Intellij has all or many of it's features as plugins, I think Eclipse had a similar architecture, the reason I switched to Intellij was the extra features and the good support for other languages

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#19

Post by mcherm »

I actually question whether the real story is the fall of Eclipse or the rise of Intellij.

My impression (as someone who used both) is that Intellij IDEA was significantly better than Eclipse (to the extent that I went out of my way to be the sole developer who used it on a team of Eclipse users) but that it was not widely used. Then they decided to release the community edition which enabled people to try it without making a financial commitment. (The "free trials" they had before weren't achieving this -- people knew that any time spent climbing the learning curve would be wasted if they didn't shell out money.) Once people had a chance to see it, they chose Intellij in large numbers because it was a superior product.

For ME, the lesson to take away here is not that Eclipse should have had a more polished project and a more organized organization, but that Intellij was enormously successful because they released an open-source version of their product, and to wonder whether a similar opportunity applies to my own products.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#20

Post by Aardwolf »

I started using IntelliJ in 2008 (so it was at version 8 I guess) and I liked it so much more back then. So many awesome features presented in ways that make sense.

With Eclipse, I was stuck by the following weird design decision: All your personal preferences such as keybindings were not saved globally but as part of your current project. What were they thinking? Who would want different keybindings for different projects, think of the muscle memory! Maybe there is a use case for having some specific keybinding for a particular project, so they could have made a way to override your global settings in such case... but not make the very first thing you do, customize it to your liking, a very weird thing different from how every other program works.

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