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Comment by heapster | Hacker News Reader

> Main tools: In this category two tools lead the pack today - Eclipse and NetBeans.

NetBeans? Seriously?! Where's IntelliJ IDEA? Does IntelliJ have a different way of debugging? I believe it's much more popular than NetBeans

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Last I checked, IDEA is the most feature rich of the three debuggers as well. Besides normal support for breaking when a condition is true, you can instead set a breakpoint to log an expression (basically allowing you to do custom printlns without recompiling your code), setting dependent breakpoints (i.e. only activate this breakpoint after this other breakpoint has been hit; very useful for high-traffic areas of code), etc.

> (i.e. only activate this breakpoint after this other breakpoint has been hit; very useful for high-traffic areas of code)

Wow, seeing that just completely sold me. I've been wanting that in eclipse for ages. Pity I won't be able to use it for work-work, just home-work :-)

Why not? Personal licence allows you to use it for work-work.

Eclipse is very much the standard where I work - changing off it would be a lot more hassle than I have time for unfortunately.

While I agree that IDEA absolutely should be in the list, I'm not sure that it's actually more popular out in the wild.

Eclipse, for all its many faults, is without a doubt the most popular. Sadly IMO, but not undeservedly. Network effects due to its early popularity have lead to Eclipse being capable of serving most any development need.

It would be interesting to see actual numbers (and I don't mean polls).

Certainly the proponents of IDEA are vocal, and for good reason, I think.

And certainly NetBeans, much like Java, has somewhat of a reputation in my circles for being slow, old, and lacking in features. Much like Java, that reputation is undeserved.

I bet it'd be a close race between IDEA and NetBeans, and wouldn't be surprised in the least if NetBeans had slightly higher overall use in industry.

I've always considered IntelliJ as the Cadillac of Java IDEs. Eclipse(or plug-in modded Eclipse) seems to be the most common in places I've worked. NetBeans seems to be less popular than either.

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