Re: [ide-dev] Yet another article advising to leave Eclispe

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxx>]

You’re right. The group here has certainly done a lot to help with usability in Eclipse. And it is much appreciated. And I think my work on the Launch Bar will help Eclipse UX a lot as well, so we are making progress.

Eclipse is much bigger than this though, and it really is the 3rd party plug-ins that are probably more a problem than the projects at Eclipse. If you want to see the ugliness in all it’s glory, try installing all the plug-ins provided by the nodeclipse project. UX degrades quickly as random plugins add toolbar buttons and top level menu items all over the place. Our beautiful extensible platform enables plug-ins to do what they want, and they certainly do. Except not everyone gets the big picture of the poor developer in their seat installing all these things.

And that’s what I’m at a loss to fix. As Mike mentioned, we’ve left it to the ecosystem to work it out for themselves and let the best plug-ins prevail. Well, I guess they have and in a number of cases, the best isn’t so good. If we were to do it all again, I’m pretty sure we’d try to give them a lot more guidance, or at least, don’t give them API to hang themselves with and minimize the damage they do to the ecosystem.

Doug.

From: Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2014 at 3:19 AM
To: "ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ide-dev] Yet another article advising to leave Eclispe

On 10/15/2014 07:25 PM, Doug Schaefer wrote:

I¹m at a loss for answers. We talk a lot about the issues but there¹s never any action to address them.

I disagree with that. There is often no immediate obvious actions, but some items turn into reports in Bugzilla that get resolved when contributors find them top-priority and/or have time for them. The way EPP packages were re-organized, the default line number preferences, some smaller bugs fixed in some individual projects, error reporting (that Marcel is pretty efficiently using to drive us to the right conclusions here... There are several examples of chats that started in this ML and that step after step turned into action and benefit for users.

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Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets