
The Fall of Eclipse (2016) - javinpaul
https://movingfulcrum.com/the-fall-of-eclipse/
======
mcherm
I actually question whether the real story is the fall of Eclipse or the rise
of Intellij.

My impression (as someone who used both) is that Intellij IDEA was
significantly better than Eclipse (to the extent that I went out of my way to
be the sole developer who used it on a team of Eclipse users) but that it was
not widely used. Then they decided to release the community edition which
enabled people to try it without making a financial commitment. (The "free
trials" they had before weren't achieving this -- people knew that any time
spent climbing the learning curve would be wasted if they didn't shell out
money.) Once people had a chance to see it, they chose Intellij in large
numbers because it was a superior product.

For ME, the lesson to take away here is not that Eclipse should have had a
more polished project and a more organized organization, but that Intellij was
enormously successful because they released an open-source version of their
product, and to wonder whether a similar opportunity applies to my own
products.

~~~
the_af
I think it was both: the community edition was certainly a big win _and_
Eclipse got worse. I distinctly remember Eclipse getting horrible before
considering other options and finding out about IntelliJ CE.

~~~
w0m
Did it get horrible, or was it always horrible and the sharp edges finally
knawed on you until you looked eleswhere?

I know when I first picked up Eclipse I was blown away by the power(coding in
mostly Kate at the time...), some level of rose tinted goggles as first
introduction to a proper IDE.

~~~
the_af
In my experience, Eclipse used to be good and it suddenly became horrible, and
it was pretty clear when this happened: around the "Juno" major redesign
(which, like I mentioned elsewhere, was both a huge redesign _and_ lacked any
kind of serious testing because of budget problems).

It wasn't a gradual, this-is-slightly-becoming-worse affair. It was abrupt.
Eclipse really did jump the shark, and you could see the shark flying in mid-
air :)

------
the_af
I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and
somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had
plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc.

Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I
can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is
unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums and found out that
there was a major UI redesign _with no automated testing and very little
manual testing_ , and the reason was "unfortunately there's no budget for
testing". This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They
decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess
the lesson here is "don't redesign something if you can't test it works",
which really shouldn't be a surprise to any software developer.

Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken
as to be unusable -- yes, I'm talking about Scala IDE, the "official" Eclipse-
based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually
inserted gibberish; I don't mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted
unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I
think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.

~~~
smrtinsert
Everyone blames the Eclipse foundation, but really they set the bar high. The
only IDE to rise above it has been Intellij imo.

They missed the boat on JS. That was a big issue for me as a full stack dev.
When it became clear they were going to drag their feet forever on updates to
JSDT and not support the plethora of languages that suddenly seemed to come
from nowhere, I had to bite the bullet and go to Intellij.

Eclipse is like a nice house in a neighborhood that needs some serious
renovations. Intellij is move in ready with gleaming countertops, fresh
floors, new appliances etc. Can you tell I'm house hunting?

~~~
rsynnott
Netbeans was also a lot better than Eclipse IMO (though worse than IntelliJ).
For Java and friends, anyway; I’ve never really used any of them but IntelliJ
for non-JVM stuff.

------
acomjean
I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the
time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I'm maintaining some tomcat
code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once
set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can't
get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I
donated.)

one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator
and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with
12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have
some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more
powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.

~~~
maxxxxx
" Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse."

We talking about people making 100k+ but are worried about spending a few
hundred for a better tool. It just shows that the same amount of money is
valued different in a different context. Spending 500 more for a better laptop
is being questioned and two days later you got to dinner with some VPs and
they blow more than $200 per person for wine and food.

~~~
neves
I don't know specifically about InteliJ, but the product price is usually the
lowest cost of a closed source solution. I work in a government owned company.
We have strict procurement rules that we must obey to buy things. Beyond the
procurement bureaucracy, now we have to manage how much licenses we have. The
install of a new instance in a user machine must be tracked. A user can't by
himself install the software, we must have specialized persons to do it. To
setup test and/or disposable environments is a hell. If we reach the maximum
of licenses, a high payed employee must spend time searching for who is not
using the software to uninstall, and surely the person won't be available.

The price is probably the lowest cost of a closed source solution.

~~~
hedora
We had a similar experience with a closed source profiler. We paid for it, and
the vendor repeatedly sent armies of sales engineers and even a core developer
to help us use it.

Because of licensing enforcement mechanisms (we had a site license, FFS), we
couldn’t figure out how to push it as part of the product to test or
production clusters, so we just use perf, even though it has maybe 1% the
functionality, is frequently wrong, and we desperately need the 99% missing
functionality.

~~~
maxxxxx
You definitely have to be careful. Some vendors are awful. Jetbrains is pretty
easy though. Pay your subscription and you are ready to go.

------
JBReefer
Still have no idea how to use Eclipse after 10 years. Vim, Emacs, VS Studio,
VS Code, a few proprietary ones - very easy to figure out.

Eclipse seems to be a magical combination of hard to use, slow, and hated.

Was there a golden period? Was it great for awhile, and now is past it's
prime, like MS Word?

~~~
Elrac
Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM Visual Age for Java, which branched from
VA for Smalltalk.

VA was an excellent tool for Smalltalk insofar as it allowed you to work with
a big soup of classes, abstracting away source files to the point of near
invisibility.

Fitting Java required a bit of shoehorning, and I must admit VAJava was an
acquired taste for me. I had to sink or swim as VAJ was the official tool of
my job work environment.

Having grokked VAJ, Eclipse was a godsend for me. It was similar enough that I
had little learning curve, coming from VAJ; and it was a complete,
professional IDE for $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community,
the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude.

Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's,
and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes,
this was Eclipse's Golden Age.

~~~
lowry
IIRC, One of the Gang of Four was the project manager of what became Eclipse
afterwards. That and the rest of the environment brought a fair share of bad
design choices. Have you ever tried cooying an Eclipse workspace in a
different directory, you would recognize the pain.

~~~
Bizarro
That's Eric Gamma. And I believe he developed the Monaco editor, which is/was
the core of Visual Code, and is part of that team now.

------
mpermar
I'm really grateful to the Eclipse Foundation because they changed my life
giving a scholarship to a little kid in Europe that pretty much never had left
his home and flying me to San Jose. Changed my life.

But they truly killed Eclipse. Eclipse probably never had to go beyond being
what it was at the beginning, a wonderful IDE.

------
Aardwolf
I started using IntelliJ in 2008 (so it was at version 8 I guess) and I liked
it so much more back then. So many awesome features presented in ways that
make sense.

With Eclipse, I was stuck by the following weird design decision: All your
personal preferences such as keybindings were not saved globally but as part
of your current project. What were they thinking? Who would want different
keybindings for different projects, think of the muscle memory! Maybe there is
a use case for having some specific keybinding for a particular project, so
they could have made a way to override your global settings in such case...
but not make the very first thing you do, customize it to your liking, a very
weird thing different from how every other program works.

~~~
pwhegohw
Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to
develop multiple projects.

~~~
Aardwolf
You're right, I remember it now. I used the wrong terminology in that case.
Honestly, the end result is the same. I'm sure there were reasons to use
multiple workspaces for different pieces of code and the same user of the same
program would still want it to look and feel the same rather than getting
thrown the defaults back in your face when starting a new workspace...

~~~
astura
You can easily import your preferences into your new workspace.

I mean, it's not even difficult to find, File>Export and File>Import.

~~~
symlinkk
But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?

~~~
astura
I use different workspaces for different projects because of differences
between code formatting. One project uses 3 spaces and the other uses four
spaces. One has curly braces on the same line and the other on their own line.

------
iamrohitbanga
I personally like eclipse more than Intellij IDEA. I tried using IDEA for a
month and even after getting used to the shortcuts I found eclipse more
productive and hence faster. I did not benchmark for my usecase. The most
frustrating part of Intellij was a 2 second pause whenever I tried to run unit
tests even though I turned auto-compile on. Eclipse feels way more responsive
to me for refactoring and running tests.

EDIT: Although I would like to add that I liked Intellij VIM integration more.
I have been using Vrapper for Eclipse and it is decent but not many people are
contributing to the project for a while which raises doubts on it's
sustainability:
[http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/](http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/)

------
stephen
"That era is now over."

Not sure that is true (pedantically), as my son is building Minecraft modules
in CodaKid, and they have him using Eclipse, I'm sure b/c it's free:
[https://codakid.com/](https://codakid.com/). (They have great classes,
FWIW/IMO, not affiliated.)

I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the
thread.

Look, I love LPS and think that now that we have the luxury of local cross-
process wire calls and being fast enough to provide butter-smooth IDE
features, that is definitely the way forward as a cleaner, less-coupled
architecture.

But whenever I pop open Eclipse, it's still faster, runs tests faster, debugs
faster (for Java code), than VSCode does (for TS/JS code). Perhaps its
Stockholm syndrome, but as a user I really don't think it's that bad.

Where I believe it is bad, and the OP alluded to this, is on the
internals/plugin side of things; it sounds like life as an Eclipse plugin
developer really, really sucks (see ScalaIDE/etc. pain), and given that the
pre-LPS architecture of every IDE was "in-process plugins", that, IMO, is what
really "killed Eclipse"/it's momentum.

Especially with open source, where people have to enjoy what their doing to
contribute, and AFAIU I don't think I've heard of anyone every enjoying
Eclipse plugin development.

But, anyway, LPS to rescue: democratized IDE development, all from within the
safety blanket of your preferred language.

~~~
smrtinsert
I find those who think it's harder have never used it or bother learning it. I
find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

~~~
Lionsion
> I find complexity to Intellij a similar level.

Yeah. I recently had to use IntelliJ after a long period of using Eclipse.
IntelliJ does some things better and some things worse, but IMHO, its
strengths weren't compelling to override its weaknesses.

> I find those who think [Eclipse is] harder have never used it or bother
> learning it.

I find that very easy to believe. Some developers just don't seem to want to
learn their tools, some want to be elitist about their tools, and the
intersection between those sets is embarrassingly large.

------
Yhippa
I'm okay with Eclipse. Here's why. As a consultant working at clients
typically there's enough lockdown where I end up having to use Eclipse.
Because of that I haven't had much opportunity to actually use Netbeans or
IntelliJ at a client. So like someone mentioned below I just sucked it up and
dealt with it.

It's not perfect and I definitely get some cryptic errors but I'm actually
pretty happy with it now. You should definitely add some plugins to make life
easier. I like the TypeScript plugin by Palantir, SonarLint for Eclipse,
DevStyle by Genuitec, and the Gradle Buildship plugin. eGit seems particularly
buggy but I like it. If anybody has any alternatives I'd love to hear about
it.

~~~
erikb
Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

------
pikzel
Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast
and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today,
IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow.

Which IDE will be the next big thing?

~~~
bullsandabears
There are multiple ways to vastly increase Intellij performance. They also
have 'Auto-share Settings' feature so you can keep a whole team in-sync with
them through a repo.

tweaks like:

\- they added their own custom property that speaks for itself:
'editor.zero.latency.typing=true'

\- it runs on a JVM, so update the JVM settings. (Like most apps, they ship
with defaults that assume you're running your IDE on something with the memory
of today's phone)

\- disable all unused plugins

This comment might seem like evangelizing but I find Intellij to be what an
IDE should be in many ways. It would be nice if there was a feature to use
more performant settings. But that's likely a rabbit-hole to auto-determine
for all variety of customer env. Maybe something to make people aware of their
options at least would be a middle-ground.

~~~
copperx
Isn't zero latency typing enabled by default now? I can't find the
documentation now, but I clearly remember reading that.

------
chasingthewind
I don't really find this convincing. It seems like the data comes from a
survey conducted by ZeroTurnaround which isn't really scientific evidence. I
have a feeling that there is still going to be a significant market for a full
featured, free Java IDE for a long time to come, though that's also an
unscientific opinion :)

------
Bizarro
I remember back in the late 90s I had bought some Borland JBuilder IDE
(shrinkwrap, at software store of course), so when Eclipse came around it was
awesome.

And don't forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly,
non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native
widgets if possible.

Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the
point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins
for various languages, frameworks wouldn't play nicely with each other.

But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed
was the intellisense/code completion. They could never get it work without
pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly
like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to
some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read
that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse
that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.

By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn't really have a need for it anymore,
but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn't think that
spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.

But I'm happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made
it happen.

On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I'm guessing after the
Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope
even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.

------
paullth
Netbeans was better/easier to use than Eclipse for a long time in my opinion
(100% accept that isn't worth a whole lot). I vaguely remember that in about
2010/2011 trying to use the maven and git plugins for eclipse together and
hitting a lot of errors. Netbeans wasn't perfect but it worked AND used the
system installations of git/mvn. Also, Ive never understood why Eclipse
insists (at least last time I used it) on importing files/directories into
some sort of workspace decoupling the files you see in the IDE from those on
the disk.

Switched to jetbrains IDEs now though ha

~~~
mmsimanga
I studied Java then taught it for a couple of years about 2001/2\. I even got
the Sun Java Certification. As luck would have it, I never programmed
professionally as Java developer. Last year I decided to contribute some
patches to a Business Intelligence (BI) tool written in Java. I could only
afford a few hours a week. I tried Eclipse, didn't get anything done for a
month. Switch to Netbeans, and was able to contribute my first patch within a
few hours. Most things just worked, I didn't have a good handle on the
intricacies of Netbeans but I was productive. I know Oracle is "evil" but that
didn't stop us using Java. Not sure why Netbeans usage is higher. It really is
a good IDE.

------
ethbro
Eclipse has for years felt like someone generalized both IBM and Java's
beliefs and built an IDE.

That's good for some types of coding, but bad for others.

... then the nail in the coffin was going down the rabbit hole with plugins.
The bazaar model only works if you have enough shopkeeps. (No offense intended
to the gracious maintainers of Eclipse packages, but many could do with a LOT
more people helping)

~~~
JPLeRouzic
Actually Eclipse was a product that IBM designed in the 90' : VisualAge (I
used it at that time, it was really slow on an average computer).

In the 2000 IBM renamed it "WAS" and it was its main studio for J2EE
(Websphere) developpers. Some people really liked it.

Then IBM opensourced it as "Eclipse". This name was perhaps a pun on "Sun".

~~~
ethbro
I think most people are aware where it came from. ;)

~~~
stuff4ben
Been a Java developer since 1999 and have used everything, MS Visual J++,
JBuilder, NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ. Sadly I just got the "joke" :( Never
put two and two together, I just thought it was a cool name...

~~~
vram22
What happened to JBuilder? I had used for a while earlier. Seemed good then.
(ex-Borland fan here.) Did it get messed up in the general mess up that
Borland (aka a few other corp names over the years) did to their once-good
products, or was it some other reason?

------
mindcrime
Meh. I still find Eclipse to be far superior to Intellij. I gave Intellij a
try last year and just didn't find anything appealing about it.

OTOH, Eclipse, while different releases have been better or worse than others,
and despite a rough period starting with the whole "Eclipse 4" thing, the
Oxygen version has been very nice. I started with a RC of Oxygen and it's
worked so well I never even bothered upgrading to the actual release version.

The only thing that really annoys me about Eclipse is that they killed off the
TPTP sub-project, and I really liked their profiler back in the day.

------
mattbierner
I stopped using eclipse because scrolling became super janky on mac after an
update. Seven years on, the bug is still open:
[https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471](https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471)

~~~
grandinj
Weird it’s oetfectly fine on my MacBook Air

------
tootie
I feel like VS Code is on it's way to becoming the next generation of Eclipse.
It's a great platform, but now it's practically just a plugin framework. I'm
hoping the maturation of the open source world will have us not repeat the
same mistakes.

Classic Eclipse plugins were all either created by big software vendors who
wanted to create a good developer experience for their products or eager
amateurs who were scratching an itch. VS Code plugins are more like good open
source projects that have contributors and reviewers and frequently sponsors.
Microsoft is strongly supporting it, but not with a heavy hand even if it
cannibalizes some Visual Studio sales.

~~~
lou1306
In my opinion, The problem with Eclipse is not that it turned into a plugin
framework, but that it ended up being an IDE framework.

Too many knobs. All IDEs are customizable to some degree, but they try and
maintain a general sense of coherence. Eclipse, not so much.

------
peterhogg
I wonder how much of this was due to android no longer shipping it's SDK as an
eclipse plugin, but moving to android studio

~~~
twodave
This. That said, the gripes listed in the article are minor to working with
Android Studio and gradle on a medium sized codebase. Yuck

------
jyriand
I'm using Intellij now, but used to work with Eclipse. And one thing that I
miss is quickly starting tests. In Eclipse it feels like tests start without
compilation and I get instant feedback. With IDEA you have to wait a second or
two before it starts running the tests. I know it doesn't feel like much, but
it's really annoying if you are doing TDD.

I started using IDEA because I wanted dark theme and Eclipse didn't have it.
Probably even now you can't get nice looking dark theme in Eclipse, not sure,
correct if I'm wrong.

~~~
smoyer
I recently started using VS Code for the same reason - we're doing a lot of
Ansible playbooks and Kubernetes manifests and editing yaml with Eclipse's
dark theme results in a lot of charcoal text on a dark grey background.

------
filereaper
Quite a bit of negativity around Eclipse found here, below are a few of my
perspectives.

Eclipse is one of those tools that I've found to give dividends over the
years, I mainly used Eclipse CDT for C/C++ development, and then moved on to
Scala and the normal Java based Eclipse. There's also DBeaver for Database
work.

The learning curve was steep, mainly around setting up projects so the
compiles happened outside the IDE. I mainly used Eclipse to discover the code
(call hierarchy was a godsend) and for finding definitions, autocomplete
etc...

Over time though the investment has paid of, going from Java, to C/C++ to
Scala, to DB work (dbeaver) all have Eclipse underneath it and the same
principles apply.

A few free plugins like Vrapper that give Vim emulation are also super nice.

A huge plus is that if/whenever I switch jobs, I don't need to harass anyone
in the finance department over licenses. This scales up from the scrappiest of
startups to the largest of red-tape laden mega-orgs.

Eclipse has fallen out of fashion but I doubt it'll die, its one tool in my
toolbox I can always reach for.

------
nanospeck
Totally disagree. IMHO I’ve tried both IntelliJ and Eclipse and felt IntelliJ
to be really complex and non intutive. I can do tasks very quickly in Eclipse
using shortcuts I’m familiar with. I also often feel the features of IntelliJ
are over exaggerated and almost all the things can be done in Eclipse if you
know how to use it. Once, I sat with a dev who was trying to evangelize
IntelliJ in our workplace (and influence our manager to purchase licences)and
explained alternatives in Eclipse for almost all the ‘awesome’ features he
showed in IntelliJ. He simply didn’t know what eclipse could do. For me
Eclipse starts really fast, I really like the UI better than IntelliJ. I
believe Eclipse provide really awesome features for a free software and on the
otherside IntelliJ doesn’t provide enough features for it’s heavy price. It
seems many programmers (not all) these days feel fancy about boasting they use
a paid IDE to hide their actual incompetence in programming. ( Ps: opinion
only from java perspective)

------
howard941
In the embedded world I keep getting run over by vendors peddling Eclipse IDEs
that look beautiful and support a nice dark theme that I really miss but not
enough to say goodbye to IAR and a fast development environment that avoids
most of the java overhead. Can't ever seem to have a powerful enough machine
to run Eclipse satisfactorily.

~~~
Gibbon1
I switched to Eclipse for a year, then switched to codelite which mostly does
what I need it to.

I'm also not happy with embedded vendors constantly pushing Eclipse based
IDE's.

------
alangpierce
> One only has to look at the TypeScript support in WebStorm as an example of
> how bad things can get.

I'm a bit surprised by this statement. I've been using TypeScript in
WebStorm/PyCharm for quite a while and have been really happy with it. Are
there some big flaws I'm not noticing or specific valuable features that
they're not adding? Compared with JS and Python, TypeScript coding feels much
nicer (as you'd expect when comparing typed vs untyped languages). Comparing
with IntelliJ Java, TypeScript support is maybe slightly less magical in one
or two areas but seems pretty much on par. I haven't used VSCode enough to
have a great comparison, but my impression is that WebStorm is a little more
laggy but is more fully-featured.

Edit: I guess since the article was from a year and a half ago, that line may
just be out of date.

~~~
Bizarro
If you look from a maturity of the Java ecosystem perspective, then even now
there's a point to be made.

Even compared to Java IDEs of a decade and a half ago, the refactoring, and
other smart-assist facilities in Typescript editors/IDEs is rather weak.

Of course, Typescript isn't generally, totally statically typed, so that
brings a whole set of challenges. And Typescript's type system is very complex
these days.

But I agree Webstorm (and really the whole suite of Intellij IDEs) does a
great job with Typescript. I think only recently in the past month or so, VS
Code has gotten unused imports checking.

------
bouncing
> Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE

That is not how I recall it.

------
vbezhenar
I used Eclipse and my memories are hours spent to install some plugin
(sometimes as necessary as Maven or Subversion support), typing some
repository address, etc. Running something with apache tomcat was a quest.
Sometimes things broke and you had to clean/redeploy it again and again until
it worked. When I installed Idea and everything just worked, it was a truly
superior experience. Idea is one of very few software products that I bought
and continue to buy. I just really respect Jetbrains developers.

That said, there were few things that I liked in Eclipse. Errors were easier
to work with. Also I could run uncompileable Java code and I liked it (Eclipse
skipped bad code and throwed exception there).

------
Insanity
> In my teenage years, having Eclipse as a completely free top notch IDE was
> instrumental in me learning to program. It meant a poor student could use
> the exact same tools as a professional. That era is now over.

That does resonate strongly with me. I learned to program when Eclipse was
(surely according to the graph) the most popular java IDE. It was at that
point a good IDE for Java as well and I was quite happy with it.

But after having used IntelliJ for three years now, I really would not want to
go back to Eclipse. I had to use it some months ago when I was helping a
student with a project, and it does look quite bad compared to IntelliJ.

~~~
vbezhenar
You can use Idea CE, it's even open source. It does not support enterprise
stuff like Java EE, but modern Java can live without it, run embedded Jetty,
for example.

------
rafaelvasco
Recently i changed to Netbeans having been using Eclipse at work for years and
was pleasantly surprised. Much faster than eclipse, no constant lags and
freezes. At home i use IntelliJ. Never looking back to Eclipse.

~~~
mmsimanga
I share your experience. Netbeans mostly works out of the box and it seems
much easier to configure.

------
geophile
When did Eclipse not suck in comparison to Intellij? I've been using Intellij
since 3.x, and every time I looked in on Eclipse, there was simply no
comparison. Intellij had a far more cohesive design -- at least for me, it
worked the way I expected, whereas with Eclipse, I had to spend time hunting
for what I wanted to do. Intellij has always looked better. And it has always
(up to the last time I looked at Eclipse -- five years ago?) had a much better
understanding of the language, and doing the right thing in context.

------
collyw
41% is hardly "lost", its still a significant market share.

One nice thing about Eclipse is that its free and there a ton of plugins for
almost every language out there. I use Pycharm as my primary IDE but I still
have Eclipse installed in case I want to do something in Perl or Java. And to
be honest there are always a couple of little features here and there that I
miss.

------
codinghabit
I've always felt that if there was an Eclipse 'lite' it would garner lots of
attention and be the go-to Java IDE for lots of developers. Eclipse got waaay
to big and slow and had several bugs where the solution was always 'restart
Eclipse'.

That being said, programming in Eclipse reminds me of simpler times where I
would program just for fun.

------
ta553445353
I find the passion behind IDEs a bit bemusing, I've never really felt the
strong benefits of IntelliJ over Eclipse, although using Eclipse for quite a
few years means the burden of changing is reasonably high. IntelliJ certainly
had very vocal advocates, the Thoughtworkers I worked with pushed it very,
very hard.

Eclipse I find to be a mixed beast; if you get it into your 'sweet spot' or
ideal configuration, it can be perfect. Mine is Gradle based projects (the
integration seems to work fine, or use the CLI), and keeping things simple
with POJOs, a bit of Spring Boot etc for more complex things. I've worked with
truly horrible projects/configurations e.g. Websphere Application Developer
which is/was based on Eclipse but with everything and the kitchen sink bolted
on. It was slow, buggy, took 30 minutes between firing the IDE up and being
able to work etc. EJB's, DB2 database access etc - just a nightmare.

So to me they're both sort of what you make of them; I find the Eclipse
plugins to meet all of my needs well, the times I've tried IntelliJ or paired
with someone that uses it, I don't agree with the purported benefits.

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coliveira
I use eclipse because it is better supported by most companies. In my company
they already know about eclipse complexity and have tools to help with it.
Intellij might be better, but in many places you need to be the local guru,
which is fine if you want the extra responsibility.

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mandioca
\- intellij: As a developer and linux user I dont see the point of paying for
an IDE rather than putting the effort in improving an open source one.
Therefore, paying for an IDE/editor is fundamentally wrong for me.

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ForgorPsxrd123x
Intellij has always been way better than Eclipse, but for a long time you had
to pay a small amount for it. People looking at dollars rather than bottom
line foolishly chose Eclipse.

~~~
clishem
Or people caring about software freedom. To this day you have to agree to a
Privacy Policy to be able to use Intellij which is why I personally stick with
Eclipse.

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znpy
No one talks about Netbeans! I used to love Netbeans :(

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PeterStuer
Being used to Visual Studio, every time I needed to use Eclipse I kept
wondering how Java developers could tolerate such an environment. Now I know
ofc some of it is due to less familiarity and exposure, but it realy felt like
stepping back 15 years in time each time I launched it.

~~~
Elrac
I'm not sure in what way your Eclipse experience was so atavistic, but I'd
like to point out that at least for several years I was aware of, Eclipse had
a significant competitive advantage:

Incremental compilation.

You could make a small change, do a Ctrl-S, and Eclipse would compile the
change nearly instantly, where all competing products (that I was aware of,
correct me if you know better) needed to fire up a Java compiler and feed it
at least all changed source files. For me, this was difference of 2 seconds
versus maybe 20-30.

~~~
Bizarro
And not only that, but but being able to debug and change code without
restarting the debugger was something I was always envious of coming from the
.NET side of things.

Java Hotspot has always been a huge productivity booster.

~~~
Gibbon1
I think that's supported for 32bit applications in the paid version of Visual
Studio. At least it was 10 years ago for C#.

~~~
Bizarro
With a whole laundry list of restrictions of what can and cannot be changed
while running.

I think they've retrofitted Mono to run in interpreter mode or something in
order to get around those restrictions

------
wehadfun
Great write up on Eclipse. I also loved the IDE back in the day. It was the
closest thing to Visual Studio that was available for free.

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knowsmorsecode
Personally, I've found the opposite. IntellJ is clunky and Eclipse is easy to
use. The new version, oxygen, In particular.

------
bahjoite
For PHPers and lovers of Free Software, Eclipse and PHP Developer Tools (PDT)
are very fine tools. Long live Eclipse!

~~~
ehmuidifici
Eclipse PDT (ex)user here. PDT worked like a charm until eclipse Mars. PDT on
Neo and Oxygen are pretty bad: PHPCS / PHPMD is a nightmare to configure and
xdebug sometimes works, sometimes not.

I had to change to PHP Storm, which is, IMHO, the best PHP IDE so far, and
worth the price.

------
erikb
TL;DR: Author doesn't like the new look of Eclipse's rewrite and therefore,
without further evidence, claims it's dead. There's really not more than
incomplete opinion in this article.

There might be a real discussion here, though. E.g. as far as I know anybody
who ever tried IntelliJ loved it so much that he never wanted to switch back
to Eclipse. In the circle around me, 100% of people. Other people may see
different outcomes. But still both Eclipse and IntelliJ where both kind of
considered leaders in the Java IDE market for a long time. So it might be
really interesting to discuss the strenghts and weaknesses of both.

Also a good discussion could be had how the path to Eclipse 4 developed and
how things might've been done differently. That would require analysing other
IDEs like the Microsoft's as well.

So, you know. Quite a wasted opportunity, right here. If someone reads this
and felt like upvoting, could you put into a few sentences why?

------
ksec
Article Header needs (2016) next to it.

~~~
sctb
Updated. Thank you!

------
sungju1203
that's due to decreasing demand in java.

~~~
fs111
Do you have any evidence to back that statement up? Java seems to be as
popular as ever.

~~~
vivaan
While it may be hard to show that Java's demand has decreased - and overall it
may well not have since many companies which were using Java will continue to
do so just by inertia - but for the latest generation of programmers,
specially ones focused on ML / Data Science, Java feels like ancient history

~~~
Elrac
Yep. As a professional developer, I'm way over being excited and enthusiastic
about Java; on some days, and having sampled more modern languages, I
downright hate it. My guess is that the grandparent poster is mistaking this
disillusionment for a decrease in demand.

Like COBOL, I believe Java will continue to be the bread and butter of
application programmers long after crossing popularity curves with a dead
slug.

~~~
foobarian
What's a good replacement for Java that has static typing and tool support? Is
there one yet?

~~~
Elrac
On the JVM, the most solid contender is Scala. It's "better" than Java in a
number of ways. Personally, I'm a bit turned off by the very intrusive role of
the type system. You may find a bit less tool support than for Java (no
surprise) and some of the clever functional-style code you write may run
slower than less elegant corresponding Java code. Still, there are a lot of
adapters, some big names, and they get stuff done. Scala being "harder" also
allegedly attracts smarter developers.

Another statically typed language, non-JVM, with decent momentum is Go. It's
like C with a slew of sorely needed improvements. Very straightforward and
there's often a single, obvious way to get something done. As a result I find
I'm very productive in it. Performance is topnotch too. Tooling is quite good.
I'm not sure it replaces Java as an "Enterprise" language for large-team
projects though.

Kotlin is another "better Java" language on the JVM. Pleasant enough to work
with, but not as large an adopting community. Tooling is good if you like
IntelliJ.

C# is Microsoft's challenge to Java. Has borrowed some good ideas from Java
and extended them, interfaces well with Windows (obviously). Tooling is good
if you like Visual everything and Microsoft.

Now may be a good time to switch to a language that more fully embraces
functional programming. F# and OCaml are possibilities, Erlang has a great rep
for stability, and Haskell is said to be very powerful but with a daunting
learning curve.

I'm experimenting with all of these and have the damndest time making up my
mind. There's kind of an embarrassment of choice.

