whirlycott1

And this article is from 1997. I'm japh myself and I love the language, so don't take this as a knock against perl. But why the ancient perl articles today?

Uh... that's from 07/06/2001.

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.

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.

At my company, we've had people use it on WinXP, Vista, OS/X and Linux. Nobody ever suffered from crashes. There are a few different flavors of Eclipse and it sounds like you were using the kitchen sink version. There's a smaller one which everybody I know seems to use that may be worth checking out.

First of all: you are using version control, right? Please tell me yes.

Eclipse isn't going to "change" your code at all. It'll put two or three files and dirs in the root of your project. That's it. Your code is the same as it was before.

The java language is actually very small and easy to remember. The standard library, on the other hand, is huge. If there's any glory in remembering what the constructor arguments are for a certain class, it's lost on me.

Plus, in the real world, many of us use what we call "third party code" which could be as simple as something as a database driver or some kind of utility class. If you think you're going to remember perfectly everything all the time, then you are dreaming.

And on refactoring: if you don't think it's essential, please do yourself a favor and find someone who can give you a tutorial. Refactoring is the key feature of all of these IDEs.

Say you have 100K lines of code in a project. You want to move a class to a new package. In your world, you spend a week doing it and probably typing javac over and over on the command line. In my world, I can do it in less than 5 seconds and know the IDE is 100% correct. When you have power like that in an easily accessible frontend, you tend to use it. That benefits your code by making the big ugly maintenance tasks into afterthoughts.

Anybody who writes java code in anything outside of Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ is wasting their time. It doesn't take an enormous amount of time to learn how to use Eclipse. It probably takes 15 minutes of someone showing you the ropes. You need to stop thinking of the problem as "I need a text editor" because that's almost certainly not what you need.

Eclipse in particular does nothing like what you claim ("unnecessary metadata and internal abstractions") except one or two files in the root of your project's directory tree. Upgrading your machines to support Eclipse means at worst spending $20 to buy 2Gb more memory, which doesn't seem like a lot to me.

All of the requirements you mention (plus a lot more) are available today in Eclipse. And you don't want Eclipse because of a few poorly defended misconceptions that you are clinging to. Go back and give this a second look and get someone to show you the ropes with it over lunch. You will never look back.

I have personally converted two people like you: die-hard emacs users who will never use an IDE because you tried them ten years ago and they sucked then. Neither of these two fellows would ever go back to that world now that they know what they're doing.

You won't regret the few minutes it takes to learn basics.

I'd be very curious to know what countries these people are coming from. I just did an analysis of social media spammers on StyleFeeder and would be curious to know how HN compares:

http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/2009/02/28/social-media-spa...

If you post the list of IPs that these folks are posting from, I have code ready to make pretty graphs and will share the results.