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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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131–140 of 149 posts

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#131
post #125
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.

They certainly could! That's a basic part of the deal when you offer something as open source.

I wouldn't choose to aid such a project, UNLESS I felt that JetBrains (the company that produces IntelliJ) was being harmful to the community of users.

A perfect example would be OpenOffice. While it was well-run under Sun I thought most effort should go to a single project not to works. Once it turned evil (Oracle) I thought all support should go to LibreOffice.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#132
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…

The rise in usage of the intellij platform also came massively when they decided to make official plug in for some languages, which worked in the ide, but also a "standalone" ide specifically for it.

I know phpstorm saw a gigantic rise in usage, and webstorm too. Right now they're doing it again with their Go ide (which again is intellij with an official go plug in), and their biggest competition is visual studio code, at least from my pov.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#133

In the embedded world I keep getting run over by vendors peddling Eclipse IDEs that look beautiful and support a nice dark theme that I really miss but not enough to say goodbye to IAR and a fast development environment that avoids most of the java overhead. Can't ever seem to have a powerful enough machine to run Eclipse satisfactorily.

I switched to Eclipse for a year, then switched to codelite which mostly does what I need it to.

I'm also not happy with embedded vendors constantly pushing Eclipse based IDE's.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#134
post #96
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…

And not only that, but but being able to debug and change code without restarting the debugger was something I was always envious of coming from the .NET side of things. Java Hotspot has always been a huge productivity booster.

I think that's supported for 32bit applications in the paid version of Visual Studio. At least it was 10 years ago for C#.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#135
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not only that, but but being able to debug and change code without restarting the debugger was something I was always envious of coming from the .NET side of things. Java Hotspot has always been a huge productivity booster.

I think that's supported for 32bit applications in the paid version of Visual Studio. At least it was 10 years ago for C#.

With a whole laundry list of restrictions of what can and cannot be changed while running.

I think they've retrofitted Mono to run in interpreter mode or something in order to get around those restrictions

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#136
post #60
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…

I think it was both: the community edition was certainly a big win and Eclipse got worse. I distinctly remember Eclipse getting horrible before considering other options and finding out about IntelliJ CE.

Did it get horrible, or was it always horrible and the sharp edges finally knawed on you until you looked eleswhere?

I know when I first picked up Eclipse I was blown away by the power(coding in mostly Kate at the time...), some level of rose tinted goggles as first introduction to a proper IDE.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#137

I'm using Intellij now, but used to work with Eclipse. And one thing that I miss is quickly starting tests. In Eclipse it feels like tests start without compilation and I get instant feedback. With IDEA you have to wait a second or two before it starts running the tests. I know it doesn't feel like much, but it's really annoying if you are doing TDD. I started using IDEA because I wanted dark theme and Eclipse didn't…

I recently started using VS Code for the same reason - we're doing a lot of Ansible playbooks and Kubernetes manifests and editing yaml with Eclipse's dark theme results in a lot of charcoal text on a dark grey background.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#138

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 started using eclipse... already 15 years ago ? I never liked it, but at those times there weren’t much alternative beside vim dreamweaver... as ColdFusion :) moved to Java it looked promising but the horrible UI, the random errors, and its slowness were so frustrating.

From the article :

> Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE

What?? :)

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#139
post #136
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was both: the community edition was certainly a big win and Eclipse got worse. I distinctly remember Eclipse getting horrible before considering other options and finding out about IntelliJ CE.

Did it get horrible, or was it always horrible and the sharp edges finally knawed on you until you looked eleswhere? I know when I first picked up Eclipse I was blown away by the power(coding in mostly Kate at the time...), some level of rose tinted goggles as first introduction to a proper IDE.

In my experience, Eclipse used to be good and it suddenly became horrible, and it was pretty clear when this happened: around the "Juno" major redesign (which, like I mentioned elsewhere, was both a huge redesign and lacked any kind of serious testing because of budget problems).

It wasn't a gradual, this-is-slightly-becoming-worse affair. It was abrupt. Eclipse really did jump the shark, and you could see the shark flying in mid-air :)

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#140
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…

> The first case it was obvious no one tested installing SubEclipse on a fresh install.

That sort of thing is embarrassing. You just know some junior dev thought "well, it worked on my computer!". I don't mind when an experimental new feature doesn't work, or when some obscure corner case is broken; shit happens. But when the main, "happy" path for a major plugin doesn't work, the project is in serious trouble and you know it's time to consider jumping ship.

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