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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they're doing this with Jetbrains excites me. Potentially enough for me to take another shot at playing with Android development. The toolset felt so raw the last time I messed around with it (Eclipse+ADT days) that it turned me (not a Java developer) off.

I have been super impressed with PyCharm, and have heard great things about some of their other IDEs. Google picked the right partner to build on/with for this.

If they have sufficiently smoothed over some of the annoying workflow/build snags I was running into in the old Eclipse+ADT days, this could be a whole new ballgame for us who don't play with Java or Android for a living.

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Senior Android Dev here, moved from Eclipse to AS when it was still in preview earlier in the year. It's loads more stable and much easier to use. Definitely recommend giving it a go if you were turned off by Eclipse + ADT earlier.

Couldn't say it better. Even the old preview releases I used were waaaay more stable, fast and user friendly than Eclipse ever was. I would definitely recommend trying AS!

That's totally true. I've been a Java developer for quite a while. And I always find myself struggling with some Eclipse bugs or bad implementations. I downloaded android studio since the very beginning for the Android projects. The more stable interface really helps a lot.

Gradle is pretty tightly integrated with the IDE now, and in general I find myself rarely having to troubleshoot build problems with Android studio. Adding new dependencies is as simple as adding a single line to the build.gradle file, it's great.

Maven: <dependency> <groupId>org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management</groupId> <artifactId>course-management</artifactId> <version>10.2</version> </dependency>

Gradle: compile 'org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management:course-management:10.2'

It's worth the transition.

That's still awful...

...ly good

I'm interested in how you would do it better. This syntax seems fantastic to me, both terse and readable.

I don't know enough about the ecosystem to suggest a better alternative, but given the obvious redundancy, I'm not sure how it could be described as 'terse'.

Since you don't know about the ecosystem...there is no redundancy in his examples.

One could argue the conventions are poor though. groupId isn't really necessary. Most artifactIds are unique, and Maven Central could be the authority for (rare) naming conflicts. Works fine for ruby gems, apt repos, etc.

"com.google.guava:guava:18.0" could have been "guava:18.0".

Not really. You should have seen the discussion about the new Rust package manager. Putting everything top level means that good package names are taken forever by what is possibly abandonware. With namespacing everything is equal, first comers don't take over everything. Especially with the Maven/Java "use your reversed domain name" as groupId/package. Maybe it's a bit too verbose, but I'd still keep a group layer above the actual package name.

With namespacing, the namespaces end up being taken forever. A top level name of 'google/guava' isn't a big difference compared to namespace:google, artifact:guava.

If everyone followed the reversed-domain-name naming scheme, then namespaces taken up by abandonwares will get flushed out of the system after a few years.

That's a pretty huge "if" though.

I suppose you're talking about the "course-management" bit. That's just the way they named things. You could just as well have the following:

  <dependency>
    <groupId>net.java.dev</groupId>
    <artifactId>jvyaml</artifactId>
    <version>0.2.1</version>
  </dependency>

The artifactId is the name of the jar file.

You appear to have forgotten the HN rules:

For all statements X If X contains "Java" Emit comment Y where disparaging(Y) is true.

Maven's HTML/XML-style syntax in dkopi's example...

    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management</groupId>
      <artifactId>course-management</artifactId>
      <version>10.2</version>
    </dependency>

...is equivalent to the Gradle/CSS-style ...

    dependency{
      groupID: "org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management"
      artifactId: "course-management"
      version: "10.2"
    }

...via simple syntactic transformations. Of course, IDE's go a step further and automatically generate and parse the whole shebang so the issue of syntax readability is moot if you use an IDE.

I'm absolutely nitpicking here, but Gradle's style is closer to json.

If at least they had used a JSON parser instead of a full blown (slow) language!

Using Groovy to parse their build scripts instead of an industry standard like JSON is what's holding Gradle back. But I suspect they'll open their build process up as an API now that Java provides lambdas.

You're working in Intellij, it's the same number of keystrokes (the entire block is generated on <dep+tab). Making a decision about a build tool based on a few characters of boilerplate is insane.

If you like Gradle fine, but this is a really stupid thing to make that choice over.

Back in the day the standard project layout for Android was using either Ant or whatever magic Eclipse itself was doing. So developers wanting to import dependencies were copying JAR files in the "libs" folder. I don't remember Maven being in the picture at all.

> It's worth the transition

Or maybe it's worth formatting a Maven syntax sample in your comment just like an IDE would:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.sakaiproject.edu-services.course-management</groupId>
      <artifactId>course-management</artifactId>
      <version>10.2</version>
    </dependency>

Gradle still looks far more efficient to me.

The word I would use is "vague".

Happy paid PyCharm user here. I'll definitely look this up.

The only criticism I have of jetbrains is that their support isn't the best. My experience has been that you can get faster and better answers by scouring the 'net than by using their support system or forum. They need to hire someone to own this and bring it into compliance with what is to be expected when you pay for a software products. I have software products costing around the same as PyCharm that have massively better support.

Again, love PyCharm, will continue to use it and recommend it, I just think they need to do better on this one area.

I absolutely love PyCharm, I use it also for all my coding needs, not just python!

Although it is ironic that I am using the keyboard scheme from Eclipse. It's just...embedded in my muscle memory.

Yes. I've started using PyCharm recently and even though it's great, the inability to have a few trivial getting started questions answered means I probably can't justify paying for it to replace the Komodo IDE I've been using. ActiveState actually answers questions.

Well, I am not worried about trivial questions which can be easy to google. The problem I see is two-fold:

First, the lack of tutorials/videos on relevant topics that are up to date. For example, the Django with PyCharm video didn't have any audio and, last time I looked has not been replaced. I find video presentations to be particularly efficient as a means to quickly communicate intended usage and workflow.

Second, support becomes invaluable when it comes to non-trivial situations. For example, I still don't have an answer for this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569766

I frankly didn't even try to reach out to support due to my prior experience. And that's the issue. I have no problem with paying for good product. And I want to stress that PyCharm is a damn good product. When I do there's an expectation of quality support.

So I find myself at a strange point. I would unequivocally recommend PyCharm to anyone considering it. It is a very good product. And I have to do this while not being thrilled about their support, which feels really weird.

Actually, as a non-Java programmer who has been attempting to use Eclipse from time to time over the years, I can tell you that it's actually pretty good for Java. But just for Java. With that said, Android Studio is superior for me. If I'd known it's a Jetbrains thing from the start, I would probably go with it immediately. Eclipse also seemed like the 1st choice according to the Android developer docs at the time (I hope they update(d?) that), so that threw me off too.

AS has been my first exposure to Java and I find it very intuitive to work with. The last 4 months in particular have seen a lot of improvements. I use it with Genymotion and real devices.

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