13 ms·

The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

135 points by javinpaul 8y ago

sungju1203 8y ago
that's due to decreasing demand in java.
- twodave 8y ago
  I’m not sure that decreasing demand in Java is what led to a Jetbrains Java IDE overtaking Eclipse. The total pie may be smaller, which in itself is probably debatable and I’m not going to bother researching, but I believe the takeover has more to do with an active android programming ecosystem than any of the other factors mentioned in the article. It would be interesting to see a breakdown between IntelliJ editions with Android Studio broken into its own product line.
- stupidcar 8y ago
  [citation needed]
- fs111 8y ago
  Do you have any evidence to back that statement up? Java seems to be as popular as ever.
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Does it matter if they don't? People are entitled to opinions which may seem absurd. https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Trolls.md#citation-baiting https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
  - vivaan 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        What's a good replacement for Java that has static typing and tool support? Is there one yet?
        Elrac 8y ago
        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.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  A large number of Android developers would disagree with that statement.
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    I'm guessing the vast majority of Android development is still using Java as its language, but I would assume with Kotlin being an official language for Android, that will be changing in the next few years. And of course, you're not really targetting the JVM when you're programming Android, but Dalvik or whatever runtime powers Android these days.
peterhogg 8y ago
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 8y ago
  This. That said, the gripes listed in the article are minor to working with Android Studio and gradle on a medium sized codebase. Yuck
chasingthewind 8y ago
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 :)
pikzel 8y ago
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?
- ethbro 8y ago
  It's true often enough to beg a question. I wonder if trying to maintain divergent builds of an IDE (core + plugin/bloat) would actually make sense? And then let the market give the company feedback on which it prefers. My gut says architecture decisions to enable bloat would still affect the core release, but maybe not? The central issue seems to be disconnect with what the market wants.
  - simion314 8y ago
    Intellij has all or many of it's features as plugins, I think Eclipse had a similar architecture, the reason I switched to Intellij was the extra features and the good support for other languages
- geezerjay 8y ago
  It dependa on which language you'd want to use. Qt Creator does its job well for C++ although it does have a few kinks to iron out.
- bullsandabears 8y ago
  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.
ethbro 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    I think most people are aware where it came from. ;)
    - stuff4ben 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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?
  - vram22 8y ago
    >Then IBM opensourced it as "Eclipse". This name was perhaps a pun on "Sun". Yes, I had read that rumour too - that it implied the Eclipse of the Sun ... Of course the Eclipse logo (last I checked) also implied that.
tootie 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- nxc18 8y ago
  You could be on to something. There are quite a lot of Java sessions scheduled for Microsoft's Build conference this year. Certainly Eclipse has left them plenty of room to swoop in, perhaps as the alternative to IntelliJ.
JBReefer 8y ago
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?
- baud147258 8y ago
  In our use case, which is developping a project using Tomcat, I've found Eclipse to run rather well and not hard to use. So YMMV
- ChristianGeek 8y ago
  I used Eclipse for 5 years starting with 3.0 and hated it from day one. I started programming in Java shortly after it first became available and loved it. Eclipse managed to suck all the fun out of using it.
  - naikrovek 8y ago
    Really? I cut my OOP teeth in Java and IBM's WebSphere Application Developer tool, which was vanilla Eclipse with a bunch of WebSphere plugins that extended functionality here and there over the open source version. Eclipse always just clicked with me. It was not hard to learn (though to be fair I had company-paid training on J2EE dev using the tool) and I still use it today. Maybe I am too stuck in the Eclipse mindset. I find the IntelliJ offering to be very hard to use with a proficiency anywhere near what I have with Eclipse. I don't know if I will ever join the IDEA crowd. NetBeans can go jump off a cliff.
- Elrac 8y ago
  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 $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community, the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude. Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's, and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes, this was Eclipse's Golden Age.
acomjean 8y ago
I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I'm maintaining some tomcat code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can't get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I donated.) one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with 12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.
- cube2222 8y ago
  I do think that the price as a cons being like 15$/month is kind of a negligible cost if you're using it every day for multiple hours.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    If you save around 15 minutes per month the cost is already amortized.
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    It is not just the price - which might be OK for someone who uses it for several hours per day in a paid job but less palatable for those who don't get paid for their work or who only occasionally need it - but the mere fact that you need to get a license to use it instead of just downloading the thing and firing it up. It is one more step to take, one more thing to go wrong, one more dependency over free software. Given the prevalence of licensing conflicts and the stiff penalties demanded by copyright holders over such issues I tend to go out of my way to avoid exposure to such issues and use free software whenever feasible.
- rdlecler1 8y ago
  JetBrains is great. I happily paid for that over Eclipse.
- 8y ago
PeterStuer 8y ago
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.
- astura 8y ago
  In what way?
- Elrac 8y ago
  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.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    > atavistic I remember this word from the movie submarine. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440292/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440292/
    - coldtea 8y ago
      It just means regressing to a prior, more primitive, state
  - hiccuphippo 8y ago
    Was that a feature of the IDE or the compiler? Or does the IDE have its own integrated compiler that can't be used standalone?
    - shadowfacts 8y ago
mcherm 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 :)
Aardwolf 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to develop multiple projects.
  - Aardwolf 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?
        8y ago
stephen 8y ago
"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.
- baud147258 8y ago
  > I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the thread. Neither do I. I don't find any harder than Visual Studio.
- altcognito 8y ago
  LPS?
  - stephen 8y ago
    Sure, sorry, Language Server Protocol: http://langserver.org/ http://langserver.org/
- jharger 8y ago
  So I'll throw in my two cents. I really liked Eclipse when writing Java programs for fun, and by myself. When Eclipse started to turn bad for me was using it in an environment wth a) other users and b) a build system outside of eclipse. Trying to use it with, say, Maven ended up with this strange combination of things that never quite worked right. Either you would let Eclipse's black box maven plugin do the work (which half the time didn't seem to build for whatever reason) or run maven manually, which would build great, but then you'd always have to remember to refresh your Eclipse workspace in order to get the application to be picked up by your Tomcat config, etc. It was just cumbersome.
ksec 8y ago
Article Header needs (2016) next to it.
- sctb 8y ago
  Updated. Thank you!
ForgorPsxrd123x 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
wehadfun 8y ago
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.
bahjoite 8y ago
For PHPers and lovers of Free Software, Eclipse and PHP Developer Tools (PDT) are very fine tools. Long live Eclipse!
- ehmuidifici 8y ago
  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.
alangpierce 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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.
the_af 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
- wink 8y ago
coliveira 8y ago
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.
codinghabit 8y ago
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.
geophile 8y ago
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.
bouncing 8y ago
> Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE That is not how I recall it.
paullth 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
howard941 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
rafaelvasco 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I share your experience. Netbeans mostly works out of the box and it seems much easier to configure.
nanospeck 8y ago
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)
mattbierner 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Weird it’s oetfectly fine on my MacBook Air
Bizarro 8y ago
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.
Yhippa 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?
mpermar 8y ago
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.
erikb 8y ago
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?
iamrohitbanga 8y ago
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/
Insanity 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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.
mindcrime 8y ago
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.
jyriand 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
vbezhenar 8y ago
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).
znpy 8y ago
No one talks about Netbeans! I used to love Netbeans :(
filereaper 8y ago
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.
knowsmorsecode 8y ago
Personally, I've found the opposite. IntellJ is clunky and Eclipse is easy to use. The new version, oxygen, In particular.
ta553445353 8y ago
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.
mandioca 8y ago
- 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.
collyw 8y ago
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.

135 points by javinpaul 8y ago

sungju1203 8y ago

that's due to decreasing demand in java.

twodave 8y ago
I’m not sure that decreasing demand in Java is what led to a Jetbrains Java IDE overtaking Eclipse. The total pie may be smaller, which in itself is probably debatable and I’m not going to bother researching, but I believe the takeover has more to do with an active android programming ecosystem than any of the other factors mentioned in the article. It would be interesting to see a breakdown between IntelliJ editions with Android Studio broken into its own product line.
stupidcar 8y ago
[citation needed]
fs111 8y ago
Do you have any evidence to back that statement up? Java seems to be as popular as ever.
- austincheney 8y ago
  Does it matter if they don't? People are entitled to opinions which may seem absurd. https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Trolls.md#citation-baiting https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
- vivaan 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      What's a good replacement for Java that has static typing and tool support? Is there one yet?
      - Elrac 8y ago
        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.
naikrovek 8y ago
A large number of Android developers would disagree with that statement.
- Bizarro 8y ago
  I'm guessing the vast majority of Android development is still using Java as its language, but I would assume with Kotlin being an official language for Android, that will be changing in the next few years. And of course, you're not really targetting the JVM when you're programming Android, but Dalvik or whatever runtime powers Android these days.

peterhogg 8y ago

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 8y ago
This. That said, the gripes listed in the article are minor to working with Android Studio and gradle on a medium sized codebase. Yuck

chasingthewind 8y ago

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 :)

pikzel 8y ago

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?

ethbro 8y ago
It's true often enough to beg a question. I wonder if trying to maintain divergent builds of an IDE (core + plugin/bloat) would actually make sense? And then let the market give the company feedback on which it prefers. My gut says architecture decisions to enable bloat would still affect the core release, but maybe not? The central issue seems to be disconnect with what the market wants.
- simion314 8y ago
  Intellij has all or many of it's features as plugins, I think Eclipse had a similar architecture, the reason I switched to Intellij was the extra features and the good support for other languages
geezerjay 8y ago
It dependa on which language you'd want to use. Qt Creator does its job well for C++ although it does have a few kinks to iron out.
bullsandabears 8y ago
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.

ethbro 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I think most people are aware where it came from. ;)
  - stuff4ben 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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?
- vram22 8y ago
  >Then IBM opensourced it as "Eclipse". This name was perhaps a pun on "Sun". Yes, I had read that rumour too - that it implied the Eclipse of the Sun ... Of course the Eclipse logo (last I checked) also implied that.

tootie 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
nxc18 8y ago
You could be on to something. There are quite a lot of Java sessions scheduled for Microsoft's Build conference this year. Certainly Eclipse has left them plenty of room to swoop in, perhaps as the alternative to IntelliJ.

JBReefer 8y ago

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?

baud147258 8y ago
In our use case, which is developping a project using Tomcat, I've found Eclipse to run rather well and not hard to use. So YMMV
ChristianGeek 8y ago
I used Eclipse for 5 years starting with 3.0 and hated it from day one. I started programming in Java shortly after it first became available and loved it. Eclipse managed to suck all the fun out of using it.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  Really? I cut my OOP teeth in Java and IBM's WebSphere Application Developer tool, which was vanilla Eclipse with a bunch of WebSphere plugins that extended functionality here and there over the open source version. Eclipse always just clicked with me. It was not hard to learn (though to be fair I had company-paid training on J2EE dev using the tool) and I still use it today. Maybe I am too stuck in the Eclipse mindset. I find the IntelliJ offering to be very hard to use with a proficiency anywhere near what I have with Eclipse. I don't know if I will ever join the IDEA crowd. NetBeans can go jump off a cliff.
Elrac 8y ago
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.

acomjean 8y ago

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.

cube2222 8y ago
I do think that the price as a cons being like 15$/month is kind of a negligible cost if you're using it every day for multiple hours.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  If you save around 15 minutes per month the cost is already amortized.
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  It is not just the price - which might be OK for someone who uses it for several hours per day in a paid job but less palatable for those who don't get paid for their work or who only occasionally need it - but the mere fact that you need to get a license to use it instead of just downloading the thing and firing it up. It is one more step to take, one more thing to go wrong, one more dependency over free software. Given the prevalence of licensing conflicts and the stiff penalties demanded by copyright holders over such issues I tend to go out of my way to avoid exposure to such issues and use free software whenever feasible.
rdlecler1 8y ago
JetBrains is great. I happily paid for that over Eclipse.
8y ago

PeterStuer 8y ago

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.

astura 8y ago
In what way?
Elrac 8y ago
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.
- dominotw 8y ago
  > atavistic I remember this word from the movie submarine. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440292/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440292/
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It just means regressing to a prior, more primitive, state
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  Was that a feature of the IDE or the compiler? Or does the IDE have its own integrated compiler that can't be used standalone?
  - shadowfacts 8y ago

mcherm 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 :)

Aardwolf 8y ago

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 8y ago
Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to develop multiple projects.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?
      - 8y ago

stephen 8y ago

"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.

baud147258 8y ago
> I also don't get all of the "Eclipse is super-hard to use" comments in the thread. Neither do I. I don't find any harder than Visual Studio.
altcognito 8y ago
LPS?
- stephen 8y ago
  Sure, sorry, Language Server Protocol: http://langserver.org/ http://langserver.org/
jharger 8y ago
So I'll throw in my two cents. I really liked Eclipse when writing Java programs for fun, and by myself. When Eclipse started to turn bad for me was using it in an environment wth a) other users and b) a build system outside of eclipse. Trying to use it with, say, Maven ended up with this strange combination of things that never quite worked right. Either you would let Eclipse's black box maven plugin do the work (which half the time didn't seem to build for whatever reason) or run maven manually, which would build great, but then you'd always have to remember to refresh your Eclipse workspace in order to get the application to be picked up by your Tomcat config, etc. It was just cumbersome.

ksec 8y ago

Article Header needs (2016) next to it.

sctb 8y ago
Updated. Thank you!

ForgorPsxrd123x 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

wehadfun 8y ago

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.

bahjoite 8y ago

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

ehmuidifici 8y ago
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.

alangpierce 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
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.

the_af 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
wink 8y ago

coliveira 8y ago

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.

codinghabit 8y ago

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.

geophile 8y ago

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.

bouncing 8y ago

> Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE That is not how I recall it.

paullth 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

howard941 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

rafaelvasco 8y ago

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 8y ago
I share your experience. Netbeans mostly works out of the box and it seems much easier to configure.

nanospeck 8y ago

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)

mattbierner 8y ago

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 8y ago
Weird it’s oetfectly fine on my MacBook Air

Bizarro 8y ago

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.

Yhippa 8y ago

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 8y ago
Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

mpermar 8y ago

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.

erikb 8y ago

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?

iamrohitbanga 8y ago

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/

Insanity 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
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.

mindcrime 8y ago

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.

jyriand 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

vbezhenar 8y ago

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).

znpy 8y ago

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

filereaper 8y ago

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.

knowsmorsecode 8y ago

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

ta553445353 8y ago

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.

mandioca 8y ago

- 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.

collyw 8y ago

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.