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Comment by thomas11 | Hacker News Reader

"includes 61 million lines of code" sounds scary, even if it's much more than an IDE these days.

I've spent a lot of time excising built-in, uninstallable plugins from Kepler so I definitely find myself agreeing with this.

I won't bemoan free software and when Eclipse works it's great but boy howdy could it do with a Mozilla->Phoenix/Firefox style split where a lot of the things that are integrated into the base install (are there really people using things like Mylyn?) are removed, leaving just the bare IDE.

They've done a lot of this with their "packages"; if you download e.g. "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" then it includes a lot less than the "default" version (though admittedly Mylyn is still included).

I use Mylyn at work to link Eclipse with JIRA using the Atlassian connector. I can interact with JIRA without leaving Eclipse if I want.

The really obnoxious thing about the plugins is that they are (as you mentioned) friggin' uninstallable and cannot even be disabled (aka prevented from loading). Why? Who thought that was a good idea?

This was a big regression for me when the super-annoying Git plugin was bundled with Eclipse -- having to manually remove bundles from the installation directory is not a lot of fun nor a very robust method of plugin uninstallation. :(

EDIT: I will of course try this release, but I predict that I'll be sticking with IDEA.

Why not go with a minimal install?

Eclipse Platform and JDT runtime binaries do the trick here. Add-on must-have plugins as needed. Eclipse Standard has a whole bunch o' kitchen sink...

Where would one download those?

from the drops[1]

[1] http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/R-4.4-2...

OK, thanks. Will give those a try later on!

It's not even obvious from this page that this download is a "minimal" install.

That is why we have clojure or scala for. Semantic invariant code compression.

Sounds interesting, could you elaborate?

I think he means that Clojure and Scala require less code to get the same thing done since Java is very boilerplate heavy and verbose.

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