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I'll go further and say that Java is a horrible experience without Eclipse. One of my colleagues at work said today that (1) Java sucks without Eclipse and (2) Eclipse's wonderful features wouldn't be possible without all the things that makes the Java language suck.

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That is Seibel's corrollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule, no? Every sufficiently complex java program need a programmable IDE to make up for the half of Common Lisp not reimplemented in the program itself.

I had a conversation about refactoring with one of the giants of the Lisp world earlier this week about this, actually. The parts that make Lisp so powerful are the parts that also make it so hard to build reliable refactoring tools. Refactoring is something you need in any language. Otherwise, the implicit presumption is that you always get your software architecture 100% right the first time around.

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