Comment by hnlmorg
2 years ago
There’s a reason people don’t talk much about Eclipse these days and it’s because it was a pain to maintain back when it really should have shone.
I really wanted to like Eclipse but gave up on it a decade ago because it required constant management from release to release. I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it.
I’m sure it’s improved leaps and bounds in that time - 10 years is a heck of a long time in any industry, let alone IT. But I do know I wasn’t the only one who got frustrated with it. So myself and others switched to other solutions and never looked back.
I was there, but it has changed. "Four updates a year" was a great decision to make, to be honest.
It just updates now, and I export my installation XML and send to people when they want the exact same IDE I use.
> I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it.
So basically the same as setting up and configuring a development environment today, except that nowadays it's a lot more centered around the command line and involves a bunch of disparate, half-documented packages/tools from GitHub (and that also inexplicably require 10 to 1000 times more space and clock cycles).
The “I” part of IDE stands for “integrated” whereas what you’re describing is just a development environment without any integration into your text editor.
That all said, I have found VSC to be piss poor for tempting out new projects. And some ecosystems like TypeScript really do need a lot of boilerplate before you can ever start on a “hello world” application.