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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#81
post #75
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know specifically about InteliJ, but the product price is usually the lowest cost of a closed source solution. I work in a government owned company. We have strict procurement rules that we must obey to buy things. Beyond the procurement bureaucracy, now we have to manage how much licenses we have. The install of a new instance in a user machine must be tracked. A user can't by himself install the software, w…

We had a similar experience with a closed source profiler. We paid for it, and the vendor repeatedly sent armies of sales engineers and even a core developer to help us use it. Because of licensing enforcement mechanisms (we had a site license, FFS), we couldn’t figure out how to push it as part of the product to test or production clusters, so we just use perf, even though it has maybe 1% the functionality, is frequ…

You definitely have to be careful. Some vendors are awful. Jetbrains is pretty easy though. Pay your subscription and you are ready to go.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#82

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?

I used Eclipse for 5 years starting with 3.0 and hated it from day one. I started programming in Java shortly after it first became available and loved it. Eclipse managed to suck all the fun out of using it.

Really? I cut my OOP teeth in Java and IBM's WebSphere Application Developer tool, which was vanilla Eclipse with a bunch of WebSphere plugins that extended functionality here and there over the open source version. Eclipse always just clicked with me. It was not hard to learn (though to be fair I had company-paid training on J2EE dev using the tool) and I still use it today.

Maybe I am too stuck in the Eclipse mindset. I find the IntelliJ offering to be very hard to use with a proficiency anywhere near what I have with Eclipse.

I don't know if I will ever join the IDEA crowd. NetBeans can go jump off a cliff.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#83
post #57
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse." We talking about people making 100k+ but are worried about spending a few hundred for a better tool. It just shows that the same amount of money is valued different in a different context. Spending 500 more for a better laptop is being questioned and two days later you got to dinner with some VPs and they blow more than $200 per person for wine and food.

I don't know specifically about InteliJ, but the product price is usually the lowest cost of a closed source solution. I work in a government owned company. We have strict procurement rules that we must obey to buy things. Beyond the procurement bureaucracy, now we have to manage how much licenses we have. The install of a new instance in a user machine must be tracked. A user can't by himself install the software, w…

JetBrains does a pretty good job making this a bit less painful. They have a license server you install that dishes out floating licenses to IDEs. Floating licenses are released after 2-3 days, so if someone isn't using the product it doesn't consume a license.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#85
I remember back in the late 90s I had bought some Borland JBuilder IDE (shrinkwrap, at software store of course), so when Eclipse came around it was awesome.

And don't forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly, non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native widgets if possible.

Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins for various languages, frameworks wouldn't play nicely with each other.

But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed was the intellisense/code completion. They could never get it work without pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.

By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn't really have a need for it anymore, but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn't think that spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.

But I'm happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made it happen.

On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I'm guessing after the Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#86

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?

IIRC, it was the way that Eclipse did/does the "explorer" window. It always had extraneous (meta stuff) in there that always drove me crazy.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#87
post #44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

IIRC, One of the Gang of Four was the project manager of what became Eclipse afterwards. That and the rest of the environment brought a fair share of bad design choices. Have you ever tried cooying an Eclipse workspace in a different directory, you would recognize the pain.

That's Eric Gamma. And I believe he developed the Monaco editor, which is/was the core of Visual Code, and is part of that team now.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#88
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can easily import your preferences into your new workspace. I mean, it's not even difficult to find, File>Export and File>Import.

But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#89
I'm okay with Eclipse. Here's why. As a consultant working at clients typically there's enough lockdown where I end up having to use Eclipse. Because of that I haven't had much opportunity to actually use Netbeans or IntelliJ at a client. So like someone mentioned below I just sucked it up and dealt with it.

It's not perfect and I definitely get some cryptic errors but I'm actually pretty happy with it now. You should definitely add some plugins to make life easier. I like the TypeScript plugin by Palantir, SonarLint for Eclipse, DevStyle by Genuitec, and the Gradle Buildship plugin. eGit seems particularly buggy but I like it. If anybody has any alternatives I'd love to hear about it.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetbrains costs money, but it's a rounding error for a professional developer. The full Jetbrains toolbox costs less than a dollar a day. My office spends more money on coffee for the breakroom than we do on Jetbrains licensing for our developers.

The problem is not making the payment, is to convince the company that everybody (or even some people) need that license. In some companies this is a lot of trouble.

It's saved me enough time, energy and tears to justify buying my own license ten times over.

My sympathies for anyone in a company so gimped that they don't allow developers to install software on their own development machines without forms signed off by seventeen people, a sacrifice to the IT administrators, and a 21 day waiting period.

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