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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#121

Post by vbezhenar »

Insanity wrote: post #102

> In my teenage years, having Eclipse as a completely free top notch IDE was instrumental in me learning to program. It meant a poor student could use the exact same tools as a professional. That era is now over. That does resonate strongly with me. I learned to program when Eclipse was (surely according to the graph) the most popular java IDE. It was at that point a good IDE for Java as well and I was quite happy wi…

You can use Idea CE, it's even open source. It does not support enterprise stuff like Java EE, but modern Java can live without it, run embedded Jetty, for example.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#122

Post by Lionsion »

smrtinsert wrote: post #108
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 find those who think it's harder have never used it or bother learning it. I find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

> I find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

Yeah. I recently had to use IntelliJ after a long period of using Eclipse. IntelliJ does some things better and some things worse, but IMHO, its strengths weren't compelling to override its weaknesses.

> I find those who think [Eclipse is] harder have never used it or bother learning it.

I find that very easy to believe. Some developers just don't seem to want to learn their tools, some want to be elitist about their tools, and the intersection between those sets is embarrassingly large.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#123

Post by Lionsion »

shadowfacts wrote: post #49
hiccuphippo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that a feature of the IDE or the compiler? Or does the IDE have its own integrated compiler that can't be used standalone?

I believe Eclipse has it's own Java compiler, so it was probably a compiler feature.

> I believe Eclipse has it's own Java compiler, so it was probably a compiler feature.

It does, and it's much better than javac for IDE use cases. That's one of my biggest pain points with IntelliJ. They've tried to implement some kind of incremental compilation on top of javac, but it doesn't work reliably and often forced 5-minute from-scratch recompiles on the last project I worked on.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#124

Post by the_af »

wink wrote: post #115
the_af wrote: post #55

I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc. Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums…

Maybe I'm really misremembering or didn't pay attention to this UI redesign. I was a somewhat regular eclipse user 10+ years ago, wrote a plugin as part of my thesis (in late 2009) and used newer versions in the last 5-6 years, it never felt really different? On the other hand I've never been a big fan either. Developing plugins wasn't fun - getting various plugins to work together wasn't fun either. It was an OK IDE…

To me Eclipse used to be the gold standard for Java (it wouldn't even have occurred to me to use it for other languages, which usually had their own IDEs anyway. This was before Scala).

I didn't remember the exact version that jumped the shark, but TFA mentions Eclipse 4, so I googled and it must have been Juno (about 2012, then). It truly was night and day: the previous version of Eclipse was fast and responsive, and everything more or less worked, and then we got Juno which was completely unresponsive, took ages to do anything, it randomly froze or slowed down, and all sorts of widgets constantly failed to render or displayed error messages. Simply killing Eclipse because marketplace or some index update took too long became the norm. I remember thinking "but this is a SOLVED problem! All of this used to work! How can this be happening?", then reading the forums and finding out about the complete UI redesign and that they didn't have the budget to test it thoroughly. I'm not talking as a plugin writer but as an end user. It truly was a horror story.

The Scala IDE thing is more understandable because it was something new and Scala is a complex language. Still, it was embarrassing that this was the official IDE and it was so bad. IntelliJ was initially also very bad at Scala -- I remember it constantly gave compilation errors for perfectly good code -- but then it got improved to the point of usability, while Scala IDE remained slow and unusable. At that point I switched.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#125

Post by tabtab »

mcherm wrote: post #19

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…

Why couldn't a collective fork the old version, similar to MariaDB's reaction to Oracle's lawyer romps.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#126

Post by vram22 »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #33
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".

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

Yes, I had read that rumour too - that it implied the Eclipse of the Sun ...

Of course the Eclipse logo (last I checked) also implied that.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#127

Post by vram22 »

stuff4ben wrote: post #71
ethbro wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people are aware where it came from. ;)

Been a Java developer since 1999 and have used everything, MS Visual J++, JBuilder, NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ. Sadly I just got the "joke" :( Never put two and two together, I just thought it was a cool name...

What happened to JBuilder? I had used for a while earlier. Seemed good then. (ex-Borland fan here.) Did it get messed up in the general mess up that Borland (aka a few other corp names over the years) did to their once-good products, or was it some other reason?

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#128

Post by baud147258 »

baud147258 wrote: post #38
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.

Usually, I use the text search, with a file filter for the various sources files of the application: that way I can find the same variable/method/class across the java, jsp and configuration files.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#129

Post by Gibbon1 »

the_af wrote: post #55

I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc. Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums…

I ran away from Eclipse after two events.

A version they released where SubEclipse's installer was broken on a fresh install. The work around was install the previous version, install SubEclipse, then upgrade.

And then the next release after, CDT Plugin wasn't compatible with the new version.

The first case it was obvious no one tested installing SubEclipse on a fresh install. The second drove home that any language other than Java was going to be a bastard step child as far as the dev's were concerned.

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