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?
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 job work environment.
Having grokked VAJ, Eclipse was a godsend for me. It was similar enough that I had little learning curve, coming from VAJ; and it was a complete, professional IDE for $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community, the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude.
Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's, and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes, this was Eclipse's Golden Age.
A lot of vendors wrote Eclipse plugins instead of doing their own IDE and everybody won. You could integrate auto-complete, compiler errors, source control and debugging all in one IDE with a little hand-tuning. You can get this to work across multiple toolchains, not just gcc. Sure, Eclipse is a hog but it still seemed better than having three ugly and buggier vendor IDEs on your machine.
From the article :
> Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE
What?? :)
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.
A classic example of Conway’s Law in action