New age dawns at Eclipse

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bloat?

[An important technical question is whether the Eclipse software will remain fairly simple--a quality much favored by developers--or begin to add complexity as more companies get involved in its design, said Meta Group's Murphy. "Does (the software base) stay basic, or will it, because all these other people are driving it, start to bloat?" he said.]

I've been forced to use Eclipse for several months now, and I'd say that it is far beyond "bloated". These guys make it sound as though it is currently streamlined and intuitive.

I've been able to use every IDE I've been exposed to throughout the years immediately, out of the box. No manual, tutorial or anything required. Not true with this IDE. If you want to configure anything, you're off to the manuals again trying to figure out how to do a custom build, or use a different toolset.

In any other IDE (free or no), I create, compile, and run "Hello World" in no time the first time I use them. With Eclipse, when I couldn't simply "Run" my source file, and expect the compiler to automatically kick in, followed by the default debugger view, it was a major turn off. I had to manually create a project, add my file to it, enable all kinds of "plugin"s, specify all kinds of build settings manually, configure a debug perspective, ...ON "HELLO WORLD"!! Truth is, I still haven't found/understood/configured all the settings in my environment.

I work on million dollar simulators for a living, so I know that an IDE needs to have complex configurations available for those types of projects. But I also know that it is very possible, and definitely expected, that an IDE have intelligent default settings and be intuitive to it's users. How can a Software Development team (Eclipse's team) not know what a Software Development team (Your team) wants/expects???

From what I've seen, Eclipse definitely doesn't fit into the "quality" group of open-source products available. It only fits into the group that is backed by a large company for long enough to be forced upon both Java and C++ engineers.

My team could write a better IDE in less than a year, given even less funding than Eclipse's initial $40 mil.

I hope that this "New age" includes a redesign, or it's going to have a vertical learning curve within a year.

Posted by: swooshxx@...   Posted on: 02/13/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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