> 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

> 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.