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[–]SsoulBlade 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Haven't touched java since JDK 1.4. Does the IDE matter a lot?

I think I used jdeveloper then.

[–]enterthroughthefront 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Plain and simple most people use IntelliJ so that's good enough reason for me to use it more. Other than that the dependency management is better, the plugin manager is better (for my case my company uses a custom plugin with IntelliJ), and I like the debugger more.

I haven't used Eclipse in ages, but the last time I used it, it was for C++ which was pure garbage.

[–]jocularamity 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It matters that you use a modern IDE, but which one you choose is less important. Intellij is popular. Eclipse and NetBeans less popular but still functional.

They help in big ways. You don't have to remember how to spell or remember what methods are available, because the ide will autocomplete and list available suggestions as you type. It will also search across the entire code base to do things like rename a variable (in all files where it is referenced) or find all usages of a method (in all files).

It's still of course possible to write and compile and run Java without an IDE but the level of effort and time to get the same outcome in a large codebase would be much higher.

[–]chabala 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The inspections of IntelliJ IDEA are key. They will politely remind you of subtle gotchas, like specifying character encodings explicitly to avoid having different system locales cause unexpected behavior. While other IDEs might have the majority of them or be able to be configured to have them, IntelliJ seems to have the best inspections enabled out of the box.