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Comment by why-el | Hacker News Reader

I face similar issues at work but I don't think Eclipse's issue is Java, else you're saying that anything developed in Java will face a "boated" fate. Eclipse's problem is exactly what Chris mentioned in the article, ok on most things and awesome at none.

Edit: Typos.

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Indeed, it's not all Java's fault. But I think Java does contribute to the overhead because my experience with Java programs in general usually involves long startup time and excessive memory usage.

(And then there's the UI bloat, which makes Eclipse look like this by default: < http://www.flickr.com/photos/geofharries/5145925147/sizes/o/... >. But that's a totally different issue. Thank goodness for Fast View.)

I see your point there. I myself tolerate Eclipse on Ubuntu, where the UI surprisingly fits, at least for me. Its almost indistinguishable from other UIs, except maybe Spotify which is (IMO) way ahead of the rest. But I cant stand Eclipse on my Mac OS X and there you can see all the stuff you mentioned.

At it's core, Eclipse is really good at Java. It's why it killed off Visual Cafe and most other commercial IDEs (was sad to see Borland go).

The issue is that it's more than just a Java language editor. Once you load it up with all the extras to accommodate development models, frameworks, runtimes, build processes, etc. it does become an unwieldy mess. But it's really hard not to considering how moving parts large-scale development has.

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