3 ms·

I think people need to appreciate that universities are not updating their courses and tools that often. Eclipse was a pretty reasonable choice a few years ago.

I think people need to appreciate that universities are not updating their courses and tools that often. Eclipse was a pretty reasonable choice a few years ago. I used it for well over a decade before grudgingly switching to Intellij. If you are doing Java, it's still pretty nice. It always was pretty good at that. For a university software engineering course, it's more than adequate. It's representative of what people in the industry would use, or would have used until a few years ago. It's open source and easily customizable. It has most of the bells and whistles you could want in such a tool. And it runs on modest hardware and more than meets the requirements for implementing some simple toy project for school; which is a big deal when you deal with students working on old/slow laptops. Are there other alternatives? Of course, many. But it helps having students all use the same thing when supporting them and it helps when that tool is not Notepad or something similarly backwards. I actually taught Java to students back in 1996-1998, trust me dealing with weird/odd/misguided choices as to what to use to edit files was a thing I had to deal with. Actually one of the key things to learn in university is learning new things. So, a slightly complicated but genuine IDE is exactly the right kind of thing to learn to wrap your head around in university.

elric 5y ago
IMO eclipse is still a reasonable choice for a university (or a developer). It's open source, actually free, and comes with all the bells and whistles one needs. Unfortunately, it's gotten pretty buggy over the years, and their tooling and process seems very unwelcoming towards new contributors.
- mdaniel 5y ago
  That is a misguided characterization, as it makes it seem that IntelliJ is not open source, not "actually" free, and does not come with all the bells and whistles one needs: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/213.5605.12/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/21... I am trying really hard to ween myself off of weighing into this discussion every time it comes up, because it's getting to be the emacs-vs-vi of IDEs, but we should at least stick to factual arguments
  - elric 5y ago
    The community edition is not the full IDE(A). The full IDE is not open source. They're welcome to their business model, and I'm sure the ultimate edition comes with all the bells and whistles, but the community edition does not. Feature comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_... Please do stick to factual arguments.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
And I think people need to realize that, 25 years ago, the Fortune 500 in the US listened to the trade press, decided that off-shoring development was the magic bullet, and now there's an entire industry in India devoted to cranking out absolute baseline-level programmers who have learned nothing but programming control structures in Java using Eclipse. Some of us work in companies that are STILL following that model, and falling further and further behind in our markets because of it.

elric 5y ago

IMO eclipse is still a reasonable choice for a university (or a developer). It's open source, actually free, and comes with all the bells and whistles one needs. Unfortunately, it's gotten pretty buggy over the years, and their tooling and process seems very unwelcoming towards new contributors.

mdaniel 5y ago
That is a misguided characterization, as it makes it seem that IntelliJ is not open source, not "actually" free, and does not come with all the bells and whistles one needs: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/213.5605.12/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/21... I am trying really hard to ween myself off of weighing into this discussion every time it comes up, because it's getting to be the emacs-vs-vi of IDEs, but we should at least stick to factual arguments
- elric 5y ago
  The community edition is not the full IDE(A). The full IDE is not open source. They're welcome to their business model, and I'm sure the ultimate edition comes with all the bells and whistles, but the community edition does not. Feature comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_... Please do stick to factual arguments.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

And I think people need to realize that, 25 years ago, the Fortune 500 in the US listened to the trade press, decided that off-shoring development was the magic bullet, and now there's an entire industry in India devoted to cranking out absolute baseline-level programmers who have learned nothing but programming control structures in Java using Eclipse. Some of us work in companies that are STILL following that model, and falling further and further behind in our markets because of it.