Can there be a bigger tragedy than the declining popularity of Eclipse IDE? | Hacker News Reader

Can there be a bigger tragedy than the declining popularity of Eclipse IDE?

8 pointsaks21619899 comments

Eclipse is to my knowledge the only IDE that allows you to code, build and debug in nearly all mainstream languages.

All you need to do is install a package for that language and you're set!

However in the last 5-6 years it has lost popularity to intellij, Pycharm, Vscode and Clion

Can there be a worse tragedy than the death of this amazing software?

I failed a subject (operating systems) because I couldn't manuever the code in Eclipse. I once quit Android development because of Eclipse, and came back because they switched to Android Studio. I got 300 upvotes on a topic that was just debugging wonky Eclipse behavior [1]. I wrote a poem once on Facebook about how much I hated Eclipse, and to my surprise I found a website dedicated to hating Eclipse.

Normally I believe a bad tool is better than no tool, but Eclipse was just such an unusually bad tool. It's a benchmark of how bad open source tools can get. I give money to Jetbrains because I hope we never go to such a dark place again.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/15761439/1402526

Ah I remember Eclipse. You want to write some Java. Someone tells you "use an IDE". So you google for Java IDEs. Eclipse is the top result. So you click to the website. You're presented with many confusing downloads. Do you use Eclipse Gallileo, Eclipse Europa, Eclipse Ganymede? No difference is explained. Do you want Eclipse for J2EE or EJB or J2SE? Do you want Eclipse Classic (wtf is that?). Do you want the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers?

Then you open it. If it doesn't immediately crash, you'll have random crashes when the UI gets confused (maybe you opened a dialog and then closed it's parent window). Plus simple things like build configurations are hard to find. Plus, the IDE likes to go into various "perspectives". Open a Java project? That's fine, the perspective makes sense. Oh you hit the debug button? Your entire UI has rearranged, and it's hard to tel how to get back, and how to configure this nee view. Oh you opened a C++ project for a quick edit? The layout is completely different from the Java layout. Do you not love it?

It's among the most hated environements because of configuration nightmares, crashes and broken features. Not gonna say I'll miss it.

IntelliJ family IDEs improve quality of life for software developers.

I grant that the Eclipse IDE works for Java if you are careful not to install too many plugins. I have not seen it work better than 50% for other languages (open source people don’t seem to get excited if the debugger doesn’t work, for instance) and if you install plugins or download the wrong version from the Eclipse site all bets are off.

When Samsung decided that all SSSP app/packages should be built and signed with Eclipse IDE it brought all kind of troubles upon us.

I had to move from Vim and a single building script I wrote to this resources heavy complicated to configure IDE.

I don't regret a single day since I moved away from Eclipse.

It also uses probably more resources than all the electron apps on my computer...

  >Can there be a worse tragedy than the death of this amazing software?

Hmmm... Famine, War, Pandemic... to name but three

>Can there be a worse tragedy than the death of this amazing software?

Too many to mention, both in the past and currently happening.

I dunno, how about the Holocaust?

Black humor aside, you can use Vim, Emacs, SublimeText, VS Code, and more, to code in all major languages. Like with Eclipse, just add the required plugins and/or language servers (and for many, support comes out of the box).

Not sure what you think makes Eclipse special in that regard.

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