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The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

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Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#51

Post by megaman22 »

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…

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.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#52

Post by jharger »

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…

So I'll throw in my two cents. I really liked Eclipse when writing Java programs for fun, and by myself. When Eclipse started to turn bad for me was using it in an environment wth a) other users and b) a build system outside of eclipse. Trying to use it with, say, Maven ended up with this strange combination of things that never quite worked right.

Either you would let Eclipse's black box maven plugin do the work (which half the time didn't seem to build for whatever reason) or run maven manually, which would build great, but then you'd always have to remember to refresh your Eclipse workspace in order to get the application to be picked up by your Tomcat config, etc. It was just cumbersome.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#54

Post by alangpierce »

> One only has to look at the TypeScript support in WebStorm as an example of how bad things can get.

I'm a bit surprised by this statement. I've been using TypeScript in WebStorm/PyCharm for quite a while and have been really happy with it. Are there some big flaws I'm not noticing or specific valuable features that they're not adding? Compared with JS and Python, TypeScript coding feels much nicer (as you'd expect when comparing typed vs untyped languages). Comparing with IntelliJ Java, TypeScript support is maybe slightly less magical in one or two areas but seems pretty much on par. I haven't used VSCode enough to have a great comparison, but my impression is that WebStorm is a little more laggy but is more fully-featured.

Edit: I guess since the article was from a year and a half ago, that line may just be out of date.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#55

Post by the_af »

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 and found out that there was a major UI redesign with no automated testing and very little manual testing, and the reason was "unfortunately there's no budget for testing". This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess the lesson here is "don't redesign something if you can't test it works", which really shouldn't be a surprise to any software developer.

Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken as to be unusable -- yes, I'm talking about Scala IDE, the "official" Eclipse-based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually inserted gibberish; I don't mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#56

Post by coliveira »

I use eclipse because it is better supported by most companies. In my company they already know about eclipse complexity and have tools to help with it. Intellij might be better, but in many places you need to be the local guru, which is fine if you want the extra responsibility.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#57

Post by neves »

maxxxxx wrote: post #45
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…

" 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, we must have specialized persons to do it. To setup test and/or disposable environments is a hell. If we reach the maximum of licenses, a high payed employee must spend time searching for who is not using the software to uninstall, and surely the person won't be available.

The price is probably the lowest cost of a closed source solution.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#58

Post by bullsandabears »

pikzel wrote: post #7

Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow. Which IDE will be the next big thing?

There are multiple ways to vastly increase Intellij performance. They also have 'Auto-share Settings' feature so you can keep a whole team in-sync with them through a repo.

tweaks like:

- they added their own custom property that speaks for itself: 'editor.zero.latency.typing=true'

- it runs on a JVM, so update the JVM settings. (Like most apps, they ship with defaults that assume you're running your IDE on something with the memory of today's phone)

- disable all unused plugins

This comment might seem like evangelizing but I find Intellij to be what an IDE should be in many ways. It would be nice if there was a feature to use more performant settings. But that's likely a rabbit-hole to auto-determine for all variety of customer env. Maybe something to make people aware of their options at least would be a middle-ground.

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#59

Post by ethbro »

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".

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

Re: The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

#60

Post by the_af »

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…

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.
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