[eclipse-dev] Re: Eclipse rant

[dotan <dotan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Of course, its important to mention that these are _stricly MY personal 
opinions_, and not the opinions of my employer. (or family, friends or 
acquaintances, etc. :)

They are solely mine.

Dotan.


dotan wrote:
> Dear eclipse-dev moderator, I hope that you will publish this rant, 
> you'd be surprised, sometimes they are good for evolution too.
>
> I'm suffering from several problems in the Eclipse development 
> environment, I would like to mention them as they are all consistent 
> bugs and annoyances.
>
> 0. Open a file in Plugin Development view and edit it, Go into Debug 
> view, start debug as Java Application then go to the Plugin Development 
> view and having a blank (unrendered) window with no editor at all, I get 
> consistant hangs, sometimes opening and closing the Plugin view pane a 
> few times solves this.
>
> 1. Open a file in Plugin Development view and edit it, Go to debug view, 
> start debug as Java Application, finish debugging, when you open the 
> file again in the Plugin Development you only see the last function you 
> debugged (opening and closing the file tab solves this, totally 
> unacceptable and an especially annoying bug).
>
> 2. I've encountered several times where Ecplise just refuses to open the 
> Plugin Development tree at all, I've noticed this after debugging 
> several times, closing the entire application and reopning it (which by 
> itself is a rather heavy operation) seems like the only solution I've 
> found.
>
> 3. Eclipse is using 72 megabytes of memory under normal operation, even 
> when idle, on average, where does all that memory go? I know where it 
> *definitely* doesnt go, that is, not to the low-tec graphics, or un 
> double-buffered screen refreshing, or the slow I/O...
>
> 4. Spontaneous curruption of the .metadata worksapce information, though 
> this happend a relatively low number of times (exactly 5 times to this 
> day), it was the disease of myriads of exotic symptoms, the most common 
> one being "Refer to the log file", and getting booted from Eclipse, 
> refering to the log file showed errors of ClassLoader failing, and other 
> interesting, surely by-design errors, I solved this one by backing up my 
> .metadata directory, just in case Eclipse decide to "roll over and play 
> dead" again.
>
> 5. General unacceptable sluggish slowness, this is by far the most 
> commmon problem, say if Eclipse is used as a GUI framework this is could 
> be acceptable (the users themselves dont notice anything unusual from 
> any other monstrous Java application) but as an IDE its just plain 
> emberessing, the keyboard input and the screen output lags, when using 
> eclipse exclusivly the refresh time is considerably better, but still 
> not good enough for most touch-typers, ranging from 1 to 10 seconds on 
> average, but when tabbing and sharing my (multi tasking) operating 
> system with more than 1 application, that is, an application other than 
> Eclipse, the lags get to over a minute.
>
> 6. Having Eclipse as a background process for a long time and returning 
> to it leaves Eclipse in an unworkable slow state, I find it hard to work 
> that way, as maybe a certified real live retarded person would be able 
> to work at this speed, any person who works near a keyboard all day will 
> find this amusing, if not sad, perhaps the Eclipse team should think 
> about it as good tool to use in special education or in down syndrom 
> therapy, not as a serious code writing IDE.
>
>
> Another one, but "not a bug but a feature", The Eclipse way of 
> recompiling upon saving is maybe an interesting feature in that "boo ha 
> bad idea taken too far" anthropological sort of way, but otherwise its 
> not very cost-effective in large projects, there should be a way to 
> disable this and get back reality.
>
> I admit, I type fast, I work fast and I want my computer there with me, 
> I have other big applications like Oracle servers, Internet Explorers, 
> Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft word open when I *work*, but _come on_, do 
> you really expect any serious developer to use the tool seriously? in 
> comparison to any other editors in UNIX (e.g., Emacs or vi) or Windows 
> (e.g., Source Insight, or even Microsoft's own IDE) this is ridicules.
>
> I didn't expect it to work well, it just looked better in the ad, call 
> me when you grow up, cause right now, this doesnt cut it, I'll stick 
> with the command line, thanks.
>
>
> Dotan.