I used Eclipse intensively and daily for quite a few years, starting around 2002 if I remember correctly, until 2008 (when I retired, or as I like to think of it, took an extended personal sabbatical to Ecuador). There are a number of reasons I really liked Eclipse, at least for Java development.
Probably my favorite feature was code completion: during coding, you can type a variable name, hit <Ctl><Space>, and a menu of instance method signatures defined on the variable's declared type class pops up; as you start typing the name of the method, methods that don't match what you've typed so far are removed; hitting return causes the method name to be entered in the editor, along with tooltips for the remaining parameters that you need to enter; as you type in parameters for the method, a menu of local variables and instance variables on _this_ is presented, which you can choose from by typing the beginnings of their names, etc. Working this way, I never had to look up method names or signatures in the Javadoc. And it also adds the appropriate import statement to the top of the file. I really liked code browsing features, too. In the editor, you can right click on any variable or method name of any class and select a menu item to open the class defininition in another editor tab, with the new editor scrolled to the feature in question. Tooltips were useful: hover over any code feature (e.g. method call), and a mini-window of Javadoc pops up for that feature (i.e. the Javadoc for the method). The debugger is really nice, with the ability to set break points and watch points (breakpoints that are triggered when a condition is met, such as the value of a variable being a particular value). There are many more things I could list, but overall, I felt way more productive using an IDE than just vi + Make/Ant + shell (all of which I was fluent in). Most of these features are probably available with emacs, with the right emacs Lisp code, but in Eclipse they were way more accessible to those without emacs experience. From what little experience I had with NetBeans, it appeared that it had very similar functionality. I also had quite a bit of experience with VisualCafe and whatever IBM's product used to be called (VisualWorks? it was a Java IDE based on their Smalltalk IDE), and they both had similar functionality, which once I got used to them, also made me feel much more productive. Of course, these are all subjective feelings of productivity, so who knows how accurate they are... Incidentally, now that I no longer get paid for programming, I've started a quest to be fluent in emacs and Common Lisp, which I suspect is a sure fire way to make me unhireable and thus help keep me retired :-) ;; Gary On Mar 13, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: > With diversity, strength. > > I had an interesting conversation with Robert Holmes about his use of Vi (I > think he uses the newer Vim variant). He's incorporated it into his work > flow in a fairly complete way .. and this is its strength: edit, compile, > look at the file system, jump back and have an install into SVN or whatever. > > The simplicity of a highly component-ized set of tools is unquestionably > powerful. > > I still claim Bash and the unix commands are the most "object oriented" suite > I've used. And it just gets better. Now all the imaging tools you could > want (ImageMagik), ditto audio/vidio (ffmpeg), math, graphing (gnuplot) .. > its pretty easy to build systems that just can't be a simple integrated gui > system. > > A while back I started looking into what language I used most on a year's > worth of work. Although Java was pretty high on the list, Bash shell scripts > was on top. > > Crusty old unix guy, > -- Owen > > > On Mar 13, 2010, at 12:44 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > >> Large IDEs like VisualStudio, Eclipse or NetBeans are >> sometimes a bit slow. This is not surprising, since they >> are often written in Java. But they offer powerful >> functions for compiling and debugging, and they have >> syntax highlighting, code completion and support >> version control systems like SVN. I can not debug a >> program with Notepad, Emacs, VI or JEdit. Who >> wants to use VI anyway? >> >> -J. > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
