Hello, My thoughts....
NetBeans has a very different past, present and future than IntelliJ (or Eclipse). IntelliJ charges thousands of dollars for its tool (over time) and has a large number of highly paid full time developers working on it. It is a commercial entity. It follows a completely different model than NetBeans. Yes there is a free version, but it is free the same way that Credit Card companies charge you 0.99% for the first six months of your contract and then 20% for the remainder. It is a business model. Get them hooked and then charge them later. It works, no argument there. It enables them to go after new 'markets' (e.g. languages and features) by developing features that the NetBeans team does not have the resources to build. Yet, Netbeans is a wonderful tool, and in my opinion, it is the best IDE. While I have used Eclipse, IntelliJ and others, it's ease of use and rational expectations make it the one I recommend to all new Java programmers. I admit I am loyal to it. As a former Swing developer I love that it is built in Swing. I have done amazing work with NetBeans and it has played no small part in a wonderful career over the past 20 years. I would love it if at each new job I started NetBeans was the standard. I also would love it if there were 48 hours in the day and I could devote those 8 additional working hours to adding the features I see in other IDEs. I also would love it if it supported all of the languages used on the modern web. Finally I would love it if some wealthy benefactor gave millions of dollars to NetBeans to enable them to catch up and surpass, in a NetBeans way, with the feature set of IntelliJ. Sadly none of the above are true. But it is not the fault of the NetBeans team. It is an open source project, with limited resources, and no doubt a labor of love for many of those involved. Unlike IntelliJ, NetBeans seeks not profit but to be a service to the programming community and to programmers who seek to join that community. I was once one of those new programmers and NetBeans enabled me to build not just new products or features but also to complete humanitarian projects which directly resulted in the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives. I will be forever grateful for the work that went into NetBeans and it will always be my first choice for myself and when I make recommendations to young developers getting started. Thank you. My best to the NetBeans team and community, Thomas Hubschman SCSNB On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 8:40 AM Geertjan Wielenga <[email protected]> wrote: > It’s still quite a challenge to understand the meaning of being an Apache > project. :-) > > Apache projects do not compete. They exist for those who want to use them > and are developed by those who want to develop them. > > A proposal in an Apache project is a pull request. > > There is no IDE or editor that is as innovative as NetBeans when it comes > to these simple principles. > > Want NetBeans to be different? Provide a pull request. > > Thanks, > > Gj > > > On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 08:35, Rahul Khandelwal <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > > I just read the whole email thread. > > Being an end user of netbeans for around 6 years now, I have to say I > agree > > with @Christian that there is a huge lack of innovation from netbeans. > > > > Netbeans does have to catch up with intellij and VS code. > > IMHO taking a sideways route rather than catching up maynot help > > developers. > > > > These days every developer works on multiple languages and tools and > it's a > > hassle to switch IDEs. > > Even the community version of idea supports scala, kotlin, rust, etc. > > > > Netbeans should at least have support of popular JVM languages such as > > kotlin, scala, etc. > > Now I know achieving all this is not easy being an open source project > but > > even the latest java version support comes after a few months of official > > JDK release in netbeans. > > > > Regards, > > Rahul Khandelwal > > >
