The huge upside/downside for me is the sheer power of Java. It has a huge amount of capability and speed, and it forces you into a very structured programming

The huge upside/downside for me is the sheer power of Java. It has a huge amount of capability and speed, and it forces you into a very structured programming model that works well for large projects. The same applies to eclipse. But for small projects it really is a ten ton hammer. The overhead of setting up full class hierarchies, GUIs, etc. for even the simplest application is huge. Again, the same more or less applies to eclipse.