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0 pointspaperwork13y ago0 comments

If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems.

To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes.

I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).

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8 comments · 2 top-level

liquidise13y ago· 5 in thread

This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something.

Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.

philbarr13y ago

"column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets"

It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones.

"Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.

liquidise13y ago

Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm.

I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.

ramchip13y ago

What do you work on? I find there's a huge difference between languages and projects. I don't mind writing Haskell or Python in emacs, but I couldn't live without VS for our fairly large C++ project.

Debugging without the IDE is a huge pain. Finding what functions call a given function, when many functions have the same name (so forget grep), is also something we use very very often to check what impact a change would have. That and "go to definition".

fdr_cs13y ago

Well, I do develop C++ with Emacs, and I don't miss VS a single day. And you can 'Go to definition', 'find callers', etc, with other editors (Emacs, Sublime, SourceInsight, etc) ...

smrtinsert13y ago

You're thinking in a text fashion and not an IDE. You don't need "multiple cursors" in Eclipse because you can right click the item Refactor name, and every instance across your entire project is correctly updated instantly. That works for variables in scope, or methods in a class, or class name references. This would be like multiple cursors on steroids if such a thing ever existed, but it wont since people use text editors mostly on languages that don't feature static typing so you can't do that kind of ultimate magic.

Also you don't need snippets because it has (wait for it) templates! Sample thing, user definable complete with variables to interpolate just like Sublime Text. Been there before ST existed as a product.

I think there is an Eclipse IDE education problem at work here. Discoverability seems to be really low.

vidarh13y ago· 1 in thread

If I had to use Eclipse 8 hours a day, I'd commit suicide out of desperation.

meaydinli13y ago

Then there must be something wrong with me. I used Eclipse all day every day for the last year for an android project and several websites and I am fine. Sure there were a few problems with updating, android and couple of other things but I solved the problems, adapted and marched on.

On the other hand, I am excited to try this new Android Studio IntelliJ thing, simply because of the hype and people's recommendation that IntelliJ is heaven. If it improves my productivity, then great. If not, I am fine with Eclipse and it looks like they got their wake up call to better their product.

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