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Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

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Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#22

Post by joeevans »

If you're a polyglot/polyplatform developer then eclipse based IDE's are awesome. You can drop an eclipse into a directory, untar it, and run it... and toss it away later if you want. Titanium Studio, SpringSource Tool Suite, and, of course, basic Eclipse are all versions of Eclipse. I don't pay a cent, and can make my way through several projects with the same IDE skill set as they all use variations of the same commands. I don't have to deal with annoying and expensive licensing issues. The IDE is free, and the plugins I choose are also usually free. By free, I mean free in all senses. If I want to get someone going on my project, they can download an Eclipse based IDE and get rolling without paying a cent. As a final bonus, most tutorials reference Eclipsed based IDE's... not a paid IDE.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#23

Post by biggerfisch »

mindcrime wrote: post #18

Because it "just works" and no other platform has yet convinced me that it is sufficiently better to justify the investment of time and energy which would be required to switch. Take Netbeans - I've tried it, and it's nice enough. But it never wowed me as being so much better that I could justify throwing away all the accumulated knowledge and experience of dealing with Eclipse that I've built up over the years. Inte…

This is the exact reason I still use eclipse too. Another point you didn't mention is that there are a lot of other products built on eclipse. For example, in high school, when I did FIRST robotics, the IDE we used for programming the microcontrollers, WindRiver, was/is built on eclipse. Knowing eclipse before I got to that stage was incredibly useful and really helped my productivity. Eclipse is also "vulnerable" to the fact that nearly everyone has at least tried it and has some idea of how to use it, which when choosing an IDE for group projects tends to swing the balance in its favor since fewer people have to learn a new environment.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#24

Post by courtf »

I've been using the community edition of IntelliJ for years now, primarily for Android work. I can't imagine switching back to Eclipse, and the switch to IntelliJ was not at all difficult. The Android plugin for IntelliJ does a lot for you.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#26

Post by re_todd »

mindcrime wrote: post #18

Because it "just works" and no other platform has yet convinced me that it is sufficiently better to justify the investment of time and energy which would be required to switch. Take Netbeans - I've tried it, and it's nice enough. But it never wowed me as being so much better that I could justify throwing away all the accumulated knowledge and experience of dealing with Eclipse that I've built up over the years. Inte…

The "time and energy" was a big factor for me as well. One day I realized that I was spending too much time learning about code editors and hardly anything about frameworks and languages. Since most code tutorials that use an IDE are using Eclipse, I decided to focus on Eclipse as my primary IDE.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#27

Post by mmorett »

Because it's free. Or they learned it over the years (and began with it, because it's free). IntelliJ is only $199, yet "professional" developers insist on using Eclipse. Like, $199 is too much to spend on your craft.

Screw FizzBuzz...the first question on an interview should be: Do you use Eclipse? That speaks volumes, far more than a silly set of "if" statements and making use of the modulus operator.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#29

Post by Zigurd »

Tedious: Yes. It thinks it is a platform. It thinks users care about its architecture, which is over-engineered. It has it's own package manager. It is tedious.

Slow: Buy a new computer. With memory. Sheesh.

Unusable: Well, it can be used. But it is a travesty of a GUI. A GUI should offer only valid operations. Eclipse lets, nay offers, nay presents on a silver platter just a click away the opportunity to do senseless destructive things. Thousands of them for every one sensible right thing you can do. It is my nominee for Least Discoverable Human Interface.

"Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

I use Eclipse. I don't find Android Studio to be materially better. I am constantly offended by Eclipse being the most rule-breaking in-a-bad-way GUI ever. If it didn't have great refactoring (that works about 80% of the way when Android XML files are involved) and pretty good code completion and documentation pop-ups I would be more motivated to replace it.

Re: Why does anyone still use Eclipse?

#30

Post by Zigurd »

watwut wrote: post #12

Neither idea nor netbeans seem to have killer feature that would motivating me to move. I know eclipse too well, I am used some its plugins and I can write my own plugins and use some of those. Netbeans was too slow last time I tried and Eclipse is not unstable for me. If I would work with android, I would switch to IntelliJ. I heard that one is better and Android plugin for Eclipse is horrible.

Netbeans performance was for most of its history a step better than Eclipse. But I can recall a time when neither would run worth a damn and Visual Studio and Visual J++ was the best Java implementation and toolchain.

NetBeans also behaves like a GUI is supposed to. I wish the Android SDK was built on NetBeans. But with Google and Oracle being at loggerheads, it ain't going to happen.

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