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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#31

Post by Elrac »

JBReefer wrote: post #13

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?

Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM Visual Age for Java, which branched from VA for Smalltalk.

VA was an excellent tool for Smalltalk insofar as it allowed you to work with a big soup of classes, abstracting away source files to the point of near invisibility.

Fitting Java required a bit of shoehorning, and I must admit VAJava was an acquired taste for me. I had to sink or swim as VAJ was the official tool of my job work environment.

Having grokked VAJ, Eclipse was a godsend for me. It was similar enough that I had little learning curve, coming from VAJ; and it was a complete, professional IDE for $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community, the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude.

Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's, and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes, this was Eclipse's Golden Age.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#32

Post by baud147258 »

stephen wrote: post #27

"That era is now over." Not sure that is true (pedantically), as my son is building Minecraft modules in CodaKid, and they have him using Eclipse, I'm sure b/c it's free: https://codakid.com/ . (They have great classes, FWIW/IMO, not affiliated.) I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the thread. Look, I love LPS and think that now that we have the luxury of local cross-process wire ca…

> I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the thread.

Neither do I. I don't find any harder than Visual Studio.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#33

Post by JPLeRouzic »

ethbro wrote: post #9

Eclipse has for years felt like someone generalized both IBM and Java's beliefs and built an IDE. That's good for some types of coding, but bad for others. ... then the nail in the coffin was going down the rabbit hole with plugins. The bazaar model only works if you have enough shopkeeps. (No offense intended to the gracious maintainers of Eclipse packages, but many could do with a LOT more people helping)

Actually Eclipse was a product that IBM designed in the 90' : VisualAge (I used it at that time, it was really slow on an average computer).

In the 2000 IBM renamed it "WAS" and it was its main studio for J2EE (Websphere) developpers. Some people really liked it.

Then IBM opensourced it as "Eclipse". This name was perhaps a pun on "Sun".

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#35

Post by Elrac »

vivaan wrote: post #25
fs111 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to back that statement up? Java seems to be as popular as ever.

While it may be hard to show that Java's demand has decreased - and overall it may well not have since many companies which were using Java will continue to do so just by inertia - but for the latest generation of programmers, specially ones focused on ML / Data Science, Java feels like ancient history

Yep. As a professional developer, I'm way over being excited and enthusiastic about Java; on some days, and having sampled more modern languages, I downright hate it. My guess is that the grandparent poster is mistaking this disillusionment for a decrease in demand.

Like COBOL, I believe Java will continue to be the bread and butter of application programmers long after crossing popularity curves with a dead slug.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#36

Post by lou1306 »

tootie wrote: post #11

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 scratch…

In my opinion, The problem with Eclipse is not that it turned into a plugin framework, but that it ended up being an IDE framework.

Too many knobs. All IDEs are customizable to some degree, but they try and maintain a general sense of coherence. Eclipse, not so much.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#37

Post by gaius »

JBReefer wrote: post #13

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?

hard to use, slow, and hated

A classic example of Conway’s Law in action

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#38

Post by baud147258 »

acomjean wrote: post #14

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 c…

I agree that the search in folder is lacking, having to select the folder before to use "search in selected ressources" is annoying. Personnaly, I just remove all the menu item other than file search.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#39

Post by Aardwolf »

pwhegohw wrote: post #26
Aardwolf wrote: post #20

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 pr…

Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to develop multiple projects.

You're right, I remember it now. I used the wrong terminology in that case. Honestly, the end result is the same. I'm sure there were reasons to use multiple workspaces for different pieces of code and the same user of the same program would still want it to look and feel the same rather than getting thrown the defaults back in your face when starting a new workspace...

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#40

Post by coldtea »

dominotw wrote: post #24
Elrac wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure in what way your Eclipse experience was so atavistic, but I'd like to point out that at least for several years I was aware of, Eclipse had a significant competitive advantage: Incremental compilation. You could make a small change, do a Ctrl-S, and Eclipse would compile the change nearly instantly, where all competing products (that I was aware of, correct me if you know better) needed to fire up a Java…

> atavistic I remember this word from the movie submarine. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440292/

It just means regressing to a prior, more primitive, state
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