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The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out. Microsoft had introduced "IntelliSense" with VisualBasic and C++ earlier, and that made the

The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out. Microsoft had introduced "IntelliSense" with VisualBasic and C++ earlier, and that made their stuff a lot more ergonomic despite the verbosity. The VisualAssist plug-in also was very useful. Without having these assistants, you really understand why "Pike style" of having short API names and small variable names was popular, even if it often left you scratching your head when reading the code.

xxs 6y ago
>The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out Not sure what's that about, JBuilder was great, so was Eclipse. I know people love IDEA but feature wise I consider it subpar to Eclipse even today.
- projektfu 6y ago
  I didn't use JBuilder, perhaps it was wonderful. Until IDEA (and Eclipse) most people I knew were using their favorite text editor, such as Emacs, vi, or Notepad++. Each one had some benefits, but I never had that ease of use I had when IDEA came out. This is all subjective, but I'm surprised people thought that the ergonomics of the language were pretty good before 2000.
  - qw 6y ago
    At work (2001) we used JBuilder, and it was a real productivity boost for me. The GUI felt very natural and powerful. Borland knew how to make good IDEs.
    - xxs 6y ago
      For what is worth - I used it even earlier and I still remap the most used shortcuts to JBuillder's ones, e.g. ctrl+- to open classes. The shortcuts were somewhat optimized for use of both hands on the keyboard w/o mouse. I still prefer not to use mouse when I code.
- yc12340 6y ago
  Both Eclipse and NetBeans had some kind of IntelliSense, but it didn't scale very well. Scanning and re-scanning project took long time. Freshly written code either didn't appear in auto-completion lists or appeared after long delay. Huge projects lagged horribly — and that was just with basic auto-completion. Doing on-fly null-checks and displaying hints, like Idea does, was completely outside of reach. I don't know, if today Eclipse fares better, beacuse like many people I switched to IntelliJ never looked back.
jsight 6y ago
I remember things like this with VisualAge for Java and even Omnicore CodeGuide.
mavelikara 6y ago
> The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out. IntelliJ was first released in 2001. Those days it was a closed-source paid product. It competed with JBuilder, Visual Age (which became Eclipse), Forte (which became Netbeans) etc.

xxs 6y ago

>The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out Not sure what's that about, JBuilder was great, so was Eclipse. I know people love IDEA but feature wise I consider it subpar to Eclipse even today.

projektfu 6y ago
I didn't use JBuilder, perhaps it was wonderful. Until IDEA (and Eclipse) most people I knew were using their favorite text editor, such as Emacs, vi, or Notepad++. Each one had some benefits, but I never had that ease of use I had when IDEA came out. This is all subjective, but I'm surprised people thought that the ergonomics of the language were pretty good before 2000.
- qw 6y ago
  At work (2001) we used JBuilder, and it was a real productivity boost for me. The GUI felt very natural and powerful. Borland knew how to make good IDEs.
  - xxs 6y ago
    For what is worth - I used it even earlier and I still remap the most used shortcuts to JBuillder's ones, e.g. ctrl+- to open classes. The shortcuts were somewhat optimized for use of both hands on the keyboard w/o mouse. I still prefer not to use mouse when I code.
yc12340 6y ago
Both Eclipse and NetBeans had some kind of IntelliSense, but it didn't scale very well. Scanning and re-scanning project took long time. Freshly written code either didn't appear in auto-completion lists or appeared after long delay. Huge projects lagged horribly — and that was just with basic auto-completion. Doing on-fly null-checks and displaying hints, like Idea does, was completely outside of reach. I don't know, if today Eclipse fares better, beacuse like many people I switched to IntelliJ never looked back.

jsight 6y ago

I remember things like this with VisualAge for Java and even Omnicore CodeGuide.

mavelikara 6y ago

> The ergonomics of Java kind of sucked until IntelliJ IDEA came out. IntelliJ was first released in 2001. Those days it was a closed-source paid product. It competed with JBuilder, Visual Age (which became Eclipse), Forte (which became Netbeans) etc.