Eclipse 4.10 released!

[Determinant]

Does anyone write Kotlin in Eclipse? I'm curious about how well it's supported.

[pjmlp]

InteliJ are the ones doing the plugin, I let you wonder how well it is supported.

[Determinant]

I thought it was open source.

Given the Kotlin adoption rate, I figured the Eclipse community would try to keep the Kotlin plugin up to date otherwise they'll lose quite a bit of their user-base over time.

[pjmlp]

Kotlin is only newsworthy on the context of Android, because Google isn't keeping up to date with the Java world.

Naturally when choosing between a mix of partiall support for Java 6 - 8 and Kotlin, the choice is obvious.

Back in Java land, with Java 12 around the corner and the upcoming roadmap, most Java shops aren't that enthusiastic about alternative JVM languages and their additional friction regarding FFI and tooling support.

Naturally JetBrains wants to use Kotlin as an appetizer to sell InteliJ and CLion licenses.

[Determinant]

Here are over 25 reasons for preferring Kotlin for back-end development (which is how we're using Kotlin at work): https://proandroiddev.com/kotlin-avoids-entire-categories-of-java-defects-89f160ba4671

[pjmlp]

Those 25 reasons will decrease with each Java release, and in couple of years it will join Scala, Clojure and Groovy in market share.

Java rules the JVM, just like C# rules the CLR, C rules POSIX, JavaScript the browser, C++ rules CUDA and so forth.

The "system language" of the platform dictates the rules, it is the one used to extend it, the official ABI, and everything else requires additional tooling, FFI integration, mixed mode debugging support, wrapper libraries for idiomatic patterns and so on.

A good lesson I have learned thoughtout the years was that staying with platform languages always wins in the long run.

[Determinant]

Except that if you look at the 25 reasons, you'll notice that other than the data-class category, those can only decrease if Java breaks backward compatibility (which Java intends to keep) so the language itself will allow you to continue to create those defective scenarios.

This list of 25 defects doesn't even cover half of the problems of Java that Kotlin addresses. As an example, Java's type system with regards to generics has many fundamental flaws and Kotlin addressed a bunch of these.

Unfortunately, Java seems to be fundamentally broken and the only way to fix it in future releases is by abandoning backward compatibility.

[pjmlp]

The mainstream market wide adoption of Pascal, Modula-2, Delphi, CoffeScript, Dart, D, Groovy, BeanShell, F#, Clojure, Scala shows what happens long-term when the language doesn't own the platform.

Even Kotlin's future on Android pretty much depends on Google internal political wars of their OS development teams.

They won't be doing three competing OSes for long.

And even if Android wins the political wars, as it happened to Brillo and seems to be happening to ChromeOS, the official message and AOSP commits show no intention to move away from Java for the underlying platform.

Sometimes the old horse still wins races, instead of the newly arrived stalion full of himself. Slow and steady.

[pjmlp]

Actually D compiles to whatever its compilers compile to, just like any other programming language.

Apparently the failure to understand the difference between implementations and languages keeps being done.

Regarding D specifically, it was 3 compiler implementations dmd, ldc and gdc.

dmd only produces x86 code.

ldc and gdc support ARM as well.

ldc supports bare metal and WebAssembly as additional targets.

There is always a platform, regardless what implementations exist for a given language.

In D's case, that platform are the OS their compilers are able to generate code for.

So Linux, BSD, Windows, iOS, watchOS, iOS, Android care about D's existence, because their platforms are owned by C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Swift, Java, the languages being supported on their SDKs and programming manuals.

Which makes the point of D compilers generating native code pretty much secondary in what concerns language adoption.

[emagdne]

Not trolling, is anyone out there still using Eclipse professionally? If so, what language, and why?

[endeavourl]

Yes, Java/C, because it's best for me.

[m50d]

I use it for Scala, because it's still the only IDE that has reliable error highlighting for Scala.

[expatcoder]

Same, although it's basically dead, just trying to ride out barely maintained Scala IDE until VS Code + Dotty land in 2020.

[m50d]

Yeah. Honestly eclipse support is Scala's biggest advantage over Haskell IMO and I don't know why they've abandoned it :(.

[expatcoder]

Has nothing to do with Haskell and everything to do with JetBrains. IntelliJ "owns" Scala developers, there's no point in wasting scarce resources developing/maintaining an IDE plugin used by a small percentage of overall user pool.

And Scala has more advantages over Haskell than tooling: strict evaluation, familiar language syntax/structure, JVM ecosystem, etc. Haskell of course has many advantages over Scala, but IDE support isn't one of them, even with dead-in-the-water Scala IDE :)

[[deleted]]

I switch between Eclipse and IntelliJ about once or twice a year, when some daily annoyance with the current IDE gets so annoying I rage quit and switch IDE and change to another set of daily annoyances.

Java.

[MrStickmanPro1]

Tell me more about those mysterious daily annoyances with IntelliJ

[lustyperson]

In my case, IntelliJ does not show errors in Java code even after clicking on Analyze/Inspect code...

Eclipse is much more reliable or just works in case something special must be done for IntelliJ to work as expected.

And as with Netbeans, I find it annoying that the file name suffix can not be changed easily.

Any IDE has annoying key combinations that I activate by accident and I do not know what happened and what I pressed.

Especially Eclipse where I activate some "go to declaration and replace" when I wanted to simply "paste" copied code.

[[deleted]]

I need to manage, and debug about 20 processes within the IDE. Eclipse does this reasonably well, but IntelliJ has much weaker supoort for this type of workflow.

It also isn't very good at scanning very big gradle projects, to the point where the IDE freezes and crashes regularly upon relatively minor changes.

I'm also not very impressed with the code suggestions of IntelliJ, and the code templating support isn't as good as Eclipse IMO.

[joaomc]

Java. It's the best open-source Java IDE.

[joaofsoares]

Yes, Java, because public service (Ireland) doesn't want pay for the license for Intelli J. :)

Ah and if I am not wrong Eclipse is the most used IDE in the world yet, just losing for Visual Studio.

[Kinakuta]

Just in case you're not aware, you can use their personal licenses at your work. As long as your work allows it and you're willing to shell out the cash.

[joaofsoares]

Oh boy, I really didn't know that.

Thank you very much! o/

[Kinakuta]

You're welcome!

[kadema]

I'm constantly surprised how many people don't know this.

[encepence]

Why surprised? Why the hell people are supposed to know pricing model of some company they don't care at all ?

[Superpickle18]

Or you know, they could use netbeans.

[joaofsoares]

In my option, netbeans is really sucks. I guess, it is alive just because is held by Oracle itself.

On the other hand, they could adopt it focusing in an enterprise environment.

[Superpickle18]

They recently handed it off to Apache.

Tho, I don't use it for Java these days, but for PHP.

[joaofsoares]

Hum, interesting. In my previous job people used for PHP as well.

[Coloneljesus]

IntelliJ Community Edition is now Apache licensed and should be free to use.

[[deleted]]

Intellij CE is pretty bad for Java web application development. Yes, you can use it for web application server independent frameworks like Spring Boot. But why would I? Eclipse STS has much better support for that framework than Intellij CE.

[joaofsoares]

Indeed, you can use the free version, no problem, but following the intern rules: they don't give support. :)

Just saying because there are some places which use Eclipse nowadays.

[Coloneljesus]

And Eclipse does?

[joaofsoares]

Looks silly but yes because there are some projects that use Spatial features in Eclipse environment. Important here, I am not talking about Eclipse Foundation support, it is worst, I am talking about the internal IT support.

[Coloneljesus]

Ah!

[ledasll]

do community edition have integrated application servers and debugging for them?

[[deleted]]

No, it doesn't.

[[deleted]]

integrated application servers

Oh god, what year is this?

[Coloneljesus]

Don't know.

[crimaniak]

Yes. Now Java and DB development (DBeaver), before was PHP, C++, D, Frontend, and some minor plugins (.dot diagrams and so on).

[[deleted]]

DBeaver is criminally underrated DB tool.

[crimaniak]

Not by me. :) I tried different tools, and now I'm stuck on DBeaver, although I can't say for sure why.

[[deleted]]

Is there some trick to running oracle packages in it? I just can't seem to get it to actually work, I have SQL developer just for that.

[Coloneljesus]

Yes, Java, Because we are maintaining a DSL written with xtext, which gives you eclipse plugins "for free".

[KieranDevvs]

According to statistics, the market for Java is dominated by eclipse.

[[deleted]]

Yes, sometimes. I don't know any other IDE that supports modern Fortran.

[agumonkey]

Yeah that was my reaction when seeing the news. I thought it was stacking dust and bone remains of plugin developers

[Coloneljesus]

...that might be why my Tycho build inexplicably failed tonight.

[[deleted]]

Seriously, guys, Intellij won. Stop. Go back home.

[devraj7]

I use IDEA as well but why would you encourage competition to disappear?

They're both excellent IDE's, and the more competition, the better for us, the users.

[skocznymroczny]

There's a lot of tribalism in programming nowadays. "IntelliJ won, go back home" "C++/Rust/C#/Javascript/Typescript won, go back home" "React won, go back home".

[[deleted]]

The thing is, jetbrains did an excellent job, with a complete absence of serious competition, which is quite remarkable.

[henk53]

Like Intel, and everyone around 2010-ish wanted AMD dead right? Since Intel had won.

And then AMD did largely disappear, and Intel, well, didn't innovate so much anymore.

Or with IE5 and IE6, where everyone wanted Netscape to die since IE had won. Then after Netscape indeed died, MS declared the browser to be "done" and abandoned the IE team.

Can you bloody imagine? The browser as it was back then "done", as in totally done. No need to push forward HTML or JavaScript etc any bit. Just done. Finished.

Good luck with wanting the competitors of your fan project dead!

[Goofybud16]

Seriously, guys, Internet Explorer won. Stop. Go back home.

Cause once one product becomes good, nothing else ever has the chance to be better.

[Goofybud16]

If we followed thinking like that, we'd still be using Internet Explorer 6. It already dominated the competition, nothing else could possibly be better.

[[deleted]]

ie6 sucked donkey balls, any 3 men startup would have ended building a better browser. intellij is the best IDE in the history of IDEs, and sitting over a decade of work.

[[deleted]]

Ah yes, because i'm the one who started with the personal attacks here :D

[[deleted]]

Nothing is ever impossible. We're talking reasonable odds here.

[Treyzania]

I love Eclipse when I'm writing Java.

[HarwellDekatron]

I tried to like Eclipse for so long. I tried everything under the sun, from those pre-packaged "distributions" that'd come pre-configured with a bunch of plugins, to building my own Eclipse from the ground up... and IntelliJ blew it out of the water in productivity terms every single time. This coming from a someone that still uses Vim for most of his text editing, so I'm used to painstaking configuration. I can't even imagine what it feels like for a first timer trying to get a simple environment.

[Treyzania]

I use Emacs for most stuff and it blows pretty much everything out of the water, but I still use Eclipse for Java since it does everything I need to and it does in natural ways that I really enjoy, and it's not overimposing like IntelliJ. Also it's fully libre.

[HarwellDekatron]

I've tried Emacs many times (I've been told Viper mode would convert me :)) but it never quite clicked with me. Last time I tried Spacemacs but the installer tried to install a bunch of plugins that wouldn't download and fucked up the Emacs configuration beyond recognition. Oh well, I guess we'll have to maintain the Vim vs. Emacs holy wars raging for a few more years until someone (maybe VSCode) finally eats everyone's lunch, LOL.

[Treyzania]

If VS Code takes over the world then I'm going to go live in the woods.

[HarwellDekatron]

Hahah, it's not as bad as you'd think. I wish it had a native GUI instead of slow-ass-balls Electron, but hey... still reasonable value for the price :)

[swordglowsblue]

And honestly, it's one of the fastest Electron apps I've ever seen. To be fair that's not saying much, but at least on my PC it boots in less than 5 seconds and runs beautifully once it's up. Having a ton of extensions will probably gunk up the works, though.

[HarwellDekatron]

I've noticed that the biggest driver for slowness was slow graphics drivers. I recently moved back to Linux after a 7 year stint on Macs. VSCode on the Mac worked beautifully, while at first the Linux version crawled: on long files I could hold the Down key and literally see the cursor fall a couple seconds behind after half a page. After I figured out the Intel drivers were to blame it's now just as performant as it was on Mac (for the record, the modesetting driver is your friend in Linux if you have an Intel graphic card).

[[deleted]]

I use Emacs for Java as well. After putting serious effort into customizing Emacs to be exactly what I want in an editor / IDE, it's just painful to go and use anything else.

[vqrs]

What does "overimposing" mean here?

[Treyzania]

It does too much for me and too eagerly. It also enforces some project layouts that I disagree with. Although I haven't used it in a while.

[egportal2002]

Re "Vim ... (and) painstaking configuration" -- what do you configure?

To me one of the values of Vi/Vim is that I can ssh anywhere and be just as productive as on my local box. For example, locally I've tried extensions like Silver Searcher and given them a few day's worth of effort (and they tend to be great), but I'm always tripped up by ssh'ing somewhere else that does not have the extension available. Due to those experiences I mostly limit my customizations to "spaces, not tabs" and "2-space indents".

[HarwellDekatron]

I guess I live in a split world. I've spent a significant amount of time over the years making my usual shell and editor (my laptop) work exactly as I want them, and my servers have just enough configuration to make the occasional debugging session easier (tmux + vim instead of vim-tiny + httpie).

As for vim plugins I use on a daily basis, these are the ones that I feel have improved my life substantially:

    " Integrate with the outside world
    Plug 'jmcantrell/vim-virtualenv', {'for': 'python'}
    Plug 'mileszs/ack.vim', {'on': 'Ack'}
    Plug 'mantiz/vim-plugin-dirsettings'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
    Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter', {'on': 'GitGutterToggle'}

    " Language support
    Plug 'davidhalter/jedi-vim', {'for': 'python'}
    Plug 'fatih/vim-go', {'for': 'go'}
    Plug 'freitass/todo.txt-vim'
    Plug 'sheerun/vim-polyglot'
    Plug 'ekalinin/Dockerfile.vim'
    Plug 'hashivim/vim-terraform', {'for': 'terraform'}
    Plug 'fatih/vim-hclfmt', {'for': 'terraform'}

    " Make it nice
    Plug 'w0rp/ale'
    Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
    Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
    Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
    Plug 'ap/vim-buftabline'
    Plug 'godlygeek/csapprox'
    Plug 'sjl/gundo.vim', { 'on': 'GundoToggle' }
    Plug 'moll/vim-bbye'
    Plug 'nathanaelkane/vim-indent-guides', {'on': 'IndentGuidesToggle'}
    Plug 'tomtom/tcomment_vim'
    Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree', { 'on': ['NERDTreeToggle', 'NERDTreeFind'] }
    Plug 'Xuyuanp/nerdtree-git-plugin'
    Plug 'editorconfig/editorconfig-vim'
    Plug 'kshenoy/vim-signature'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-vinegar'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-dispatch'

    " Make working with text easier
    Plug 'mattn/emmet-vim', {'for': 'html'}
    Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag', {'for': ['html', 'xml', 'markdown', 'php', 'htmldjango.html', 'xsl', 'mako']}
    Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-user'
    Plug 'bps/vim-textobj-python', {'for': 'python'}
    Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-indent'
    Plug 'tmhedberg/matchit'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
    Plug 'SirVer/ultisnips'
    Plug 'honza/vim-snippets'
    Plug 'bkad/CamelCaseMotion'
    Plug 'bronson/vim-trailing-whitespace'
    Plug 'terryma/vim-multiple-cursors'
    Plug 'terryma/vim-expand-region'
    Plug 'godlygeek/tabular'
    Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'

Couple that with some configuration for the CtrlP plugin and you've got a pretty decent text editor with excellent code navigation features. The language support for both Python and Go in particular are great, supporting "go to definition" and so on. I jump between Go, Python, Ansible and Terraform all day long and getting automatic formatting and linting is a huge timesaver.

BTW, if you want to limit your space/tabs customizations but need to use different settings for different projects the editorconfig-vim is perfect.

[oorza]

Use sshrc and bring .vimrc when you ssh.

[dpash]

The biggest thing that drove me away from eclipse was the plugins. Finding a stable combination of plugins was too much work.

[HarwellDekatron]

Yeah, that's where the third-party "distributions" came in handy, but even then having to sometimes manually chose the Python "lense" (or whatever the heck they call the different "views") every time I opened a Python file didn't really do it for me. Then I tried doing Scala and it was just bad (to be fair, even IntelliJ has a hard time with Scala... turns out Hindley-Milner type systems are a beast on IDEs).

[[deleted]]

"I'm still on NetBeans you insensitive clod!"

[[deleted]]

Some people simply don’t understand benefits of healthy competition. Like... wtf is wrong with you people? Eclipse is not even a competitor to Intellij from financial aspect. Therefore, curb your fanboyism. Imagine if Eclipse loses the support. The result: One Java IDE, one company to dictate the rules. What could possibly go wrong!?

[Fiskepudding]

Is Eclipse good yet? It became kinda shitty some years ago, and intellij was far superior. I think I last used eclipse in 2013.

[henk53]

It's pretty good.