
The fall of Eclipse - pdeva1
http://movingfulcrum.com/the-fall-of-eclipse/
======
clishem

        All that said, Eclipse JDT remained a solid IDE for pure Java development and the go-to choice for students and open source projects looking for a free IDE.
    
        This was killed by the launch of Intellij Community Edition.
    

Not in my experience. The majority of students at my university still seems to
be using Eclipse.

~~~
douche
I would suspect this is only because they don't know any better. There is very
little defendable reason for suffering with Eclipse for basic Java work when
IntelliJ is free.

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zelos
I'd guess that Google switching the Android IDE from Eclipse to IntelliJ had a
pretty big effect on usage numbers.

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wodenokoto
Given how much the author talks about eclipse getting ugly from 3.x to 4.x it
would have been nice with before and after screenshots in the article.

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time4tea
Use of eclipse is highly correlated with people that use editors as if they
are notepad.

~~~
gravypod
Yea I use Eclipse exactly like a text editor that has project management
features, refactoring support, formatting, automated imports and class
completion, dependency management, compiling and packaging.

That is I and most Eclipse users use Eclipse as an IDE. Not as vim/emacs.

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cantor
I tried IntelliJ and came back to elegance of Eclipse. Nothing beats Eclipse.

~~~
gravypod
Until something can do the auto importing that Eclipse can do nothing will
beat it.

On a side not I've also disliked IntelliJ's code quality defaults. Back when I
tried it, it said that defining List objects without using type definitions
for it's generic was ok.

    
    
       List test = new ArrayList<String>();
    

Was not marked as a warning even though you should be defining that in every
location possible, imo, to clarify what's going on. There were other things
but it was a long time ago and I won't remember them unless I download it and
try it again.

Although JetBrains can't be beat for CLion, PHPStorm, soon Rider, and PyCharm.

~~~
wst_
What you describe (generics auto complete) has never happened to me and I use
IntelliJ for a long time now.

And here's info about automatic importing:
[https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/auto-
import.html](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/auto-import.html)

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TurboHaskal
I liked JBuilder back in the day and today I use STS (based on Eclipse)
because as much as I tried to like IntelliJ, I really don't understand what's
going on.

~~~
felice_landry
Over about 20 years of Java I've personally had to deal with JBuilder, Visual
J++, Eclipse, IntelliJ and NetBeans and probably some I've forgotten. I don't
understand where all the Eclipse hate comes from - it's fast, responsive,
extensible and works well. Looks elegant to me too, where is that vitriol
coming from in the article?

I've certainly seen configurations of Eclipse that are abysmal (Rational
Application Developer) and/or frameworks that make things unbearable (moreso
in the past). But it's always felt more usable and productive than anything
else I've tried. I don't understand the passion I see from IntelliJ users
either... it's about as ugly and unintuitive to me as NetBeans was. Perhaps
it's just what you're used to.

One positive people tend to raise in support of IntelliJ IDEA is it's
refactoring support... I've honestly found Eclipse's to be better. Normally I
wouldn't defend anything so heavily backed by IBM, but objectively it's far
better than anything else as far as I've found.

~~~
wst_
It may be because the fact that Eclipse has cluttered user interface which
looks like something developed in the 90s, despite we have 2016 now. Maybe
because it has myriads of plugins that are not well maintained, documented, or
just does not work. Maybe because auto-completion is slow and does not display
most probable candidates. It might also be that dark theme is pain in the
eyes. I don't know, really...

Seriously though, I believe Eclipse should hire good UI designer to produce
modern, fast and good looking interface. Measure what people use, how they use
it, for what reason - and then improve it. I got a feeling that they forgot
(and it happened very early in the project life time) about the most important
part of every project - end user.

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dagett_beaver
Even long time ago I felt like the author. Eclipse was somehow never 'round'.

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executesorder66
I wonder what percentage of pure Java programmers code in vim with a java-
autocomplete plugin.

~~~
caseymarquis
Probably not many. Refactoring support in IDEs for static languages is a huge
time saver. Reference management and simplicity of compiling are other
benefits. Also IntelliJ has a vim mode.

~~~
tauchunfall
Visual Studio Code uses OmniSharp as middleware for the C# extension for
instance to check code, find usages, and lookup types. The "rename symbol"
works fine so far. I guess, but am not sure, they use the language server
protocol [1] to communicate with OmniSharp.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a Java language server [2] which utilizes
Eclipse JDT. Maybe if the Java language server supports refactoring and Vim
support the language server protocol, we could have refactoring of Java code
in Vim on par with Eclipse.

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-
protocol](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol) [2]
[https://github.com/gorkem/java-language-
server](https://github.com/gorkem/java-language-server)

