Eclipse rant

I hate Eclipse (or maybe its the other way round). This was my reaction after my first interaction with the tool. I feel its just a fancy editor than a real IDE. I feel I am supposed to be productive the moment I install the IDE, not spend a day learning the IDE and half a day configuring it, finding plugins and resolving version issues with them. They say it is a platform for doing anything and nothing in particular. Well I feel it is not always good to be too general purpose. You have to focus on the needs of your users. The only good thing about Eclipse I find is that its lightweight and free.

Also look at its integration with tools. Talk about Ant. I feel the way Eclipse deals with Ant really sucks. Hello!! I am supposed to be using Ant not Eclipse!! I have already invested valuable time learning about Ant and do I now have to learn how Eclipse handles it? Look at NetBeans instead. It maps directly to the way we normally interact with Ant. Like creating targets, adding tasks, and running them. Thats it... its that simple. Talk about Version Control. Rather not, right? No support for anything other than CVS. And support for CVS is well over engineered I feel. CVS is supposed to be simple man. Look at the command line tooling CVS provides. Almost all the developers are used to using that functionality. But with Eclipse we have to learn a new technology called Team Synchronization. Fancy and cool but useless. On the other hand, Netbeans provides tools to map directly to the CVS command line tools and you are in much more control. You know where you are going. In fact it even shows you the commands that will be executed as a result of pressing some buttons.

On a broader scope of things lets look at the Mission of both tools. Eclipse is a barebones implementation which is there just to get people frustrated and force them to buy IBM WSAD. While NetBeans is a fully functional/complete IDE with all the features included for free. You dont have to spend a penny. I know it is supposed to feed Sun's ONE Studio but all the features included in the proprietry tool are also there in the open-source version, maybe better.

Plugins? Come on man. I am supposed to use the IDE not the other way round!! The IDE is the one which is supposed to provide me services and facilities not vice versa. And talking about Plugins I cant find reasonable plugins that are decent and work Out-of-the-box with my version of Eclipse. Even if they do they puke when I upgrade my version of Eclipse. Anything decent costs me money. Plugins are a bad idea from the beginning I feel. A user interface is supposed to be consistent. That is the key to usability. Plugins are not - useable or consistent. And most of them suck. Come one people its not a toy to put stickers on - its an IDE which is supposed to get work done. I am supposed to focus on the work I do rather than finding and configuring my plugins.

I dont mean NetBeans is the best IDE around but it is more usable than Eclipse for sure, once it starts up that is. NetBeans is a beast when it comes to resources. And its buggy as hell. Crashes are frequent and hangs a lot of the times.

If Netbeans is resource-hungry Eclipse is configuration-hungry. You even have to add jar files to the build path which are in the lib directory. Pick it up yourself for once!!

Yes Eclipse has some good features for editing at least but you really have to take a Eclipse 401 course to be able to use them. Its just like Linux. Linux is a great operating system and is surely very powerful. But you have to do a lot of learning up front to be ablt to harness it to its full potential. But as you must have noticed, Desktop really sucks on Linux. No two apps are alike and usability is nil. Even Linus Trovalds accepts this as I read somewhere recently that he said it will take 10 years for Linux to be able to deliver in the Desktop area. Eclipse is just like that, even worse coz I cant see how it could improve. Windows is bad and all but at least its usable out of the box, as long as it doesn't hang or crash, just like NetBeans.

Maybe I have had a bad experience with Eclipse and am too dumb/lazy to delve deeper into the Tool to discover its hidden treasures. But I am too fed up at this point. Anyone sees things improving in the IDE arena?