Comment by campnic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by campnic | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this will be welcomed on hacker news, but its almost laughable to me when people try to dismiss eclipse. Not just to the author, but some of the other comments here. Eclipse is probably one of the most sophisticated software development platforms out there.

Have you used the debugger (emulator or physical device)? How about the integration of DDMS into eclipse? FindBugs? HotSwaping? One IDE for python, php, java ... etc? Code profiling? The list is basically endless.

It is second nature to me, but its confusing how someone coming from xcode could rail against eclipse. Sure, I like using vim sometimes, but compare adding a plugin to eclipse to adding a plugin to vim. Compare the debug capabilities of eclipse to nearly every other debugger I've ever worked with. You can do instruction step by step debugging on a physical device! It integrates with your scm and you project management.

I really think Eclipse gets a bad rap from people who haven't used it since 2004 and base their entire analysis on what their experience was then. But to come to a modern version of Eclipse and compare it to XCode and find eclipse lacking ... i find that suspicious.

Edit: Full disclosure ... Java coder for 6 years, android for 1.5 but have used Xcode enough :)

I used Eclipse daily for the last year and regularly for five or so before that. I've switched to Netbeans in the past (and back because of concerns at work--our build process hates Netbeans) and have been using IntelliJ for the last three months. Since switching to IntelliJ, I've never been happier when working in Java (would still prefer Visual Studio to any of this, though).

IMO, anyway, Eclipse's problem is that it doesn't feel like an IDE. It feels like a framework for making IDEs, and Java's sort of bolted in. The user experience is not good, and worse when using non-Java language. A lot of this can be chalked up to Eclipse being a very early example of this sort of IDE framework design, but there are a lot of warts that have just never been fixed.

It's just not a comfortable environment. Honestly it feels like the developers of the Java ecosystem atop Eclipse went "eh, close enough" at one point and it's stayed there for half a decade. It doesn't feel like anyone spent time looking at how users actually write code, but rather went off how they wrote code and extrapolated it to their userbase.

I have always used IDE's. I was a big fan of Visual Studio when coding on Windows and I love Xcode on the Mac. For me Eclipse tries to do too much. I agree that it is very powerful but that might be the cause of the problem. Just looking the preferences there are hundreds of settings. It is also very slow a buggy for me.

The code completion is incredible though. This is my favourite feature of Eclipse. I particularly like how if I forget to include something it will warn me and do it for me with one click.

As a developer using Visual Studio in my day job for the past six years, I simply cannot get a hold of Eclipse. I have tried repeatedly, and failed because it is so very clunky, slow, and unintuitive. Have recently been playing with IntelliJ, and think I will stick with this for the time being.

However, of course, Visual Studio with Resharper has just spoilt me rotten, can't expect that environment from every IDE.

My experience was otherwise.

of which bit?

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