Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison

[Michael Scharf <eclipse@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-09-07 20:34, Doug Schaefer wrote:
> There’s one comparison which drives the rest, IMHO.
>
> JetBrains has a product focused organization while Eclipse does not.
>

That kind of means, JetBrains is using the 'Cathedral' approach and Eclipse
the 'Bazaar' approach, right?

The last years I have been working on Web applications, and I see the
endless waste of resources by the wild Bazaar of the Web. Compared to
the Web, Eclipse is a Cathedral.

Yes, there is much more diversity on the Bazaar, but eventually something
great might come out, but for my taste there too much reinventing the wheel,
and abandoning things that started with great promises.

Developing software for 40+ years makes me wonder, why the same things
have to be invented over and over again. It is like our industry is not
learning and each generation of developers is excited about inventing
the same things again and again.

> I don’t know the internal organization of JetBrains, but their
> products show they have a strong architect who sees the big picture
> of their entire product suite

Hmm, once again I have to refer to an article I wrote some time ago
on the topic how we could make eclipse more attractive again:
  http://michaelscharf.blogspot.gr/2014/05/how-to-make-eclipse-attractive-to-new.html

Doug, you may remember the early discussions about the eclipse
architecture when we met the first times. At that time, I have been
working for 10+ years on an IDE (SNiFF+) where we had an generic
editor and a language service (external parsers with a dedicated
protocol to talk to the IDE). At that time it was not possible to get
any of those ideas into eclipse. People wanted to build ADT, BDT, CDT,
... JDT ... ZDT. Instead of a more common DT.

Instead of separating the IDE in terms of services (like why is makefile
support part of CDT) the Eclipse is separated by language.

When I first read about language server, I started laughing, because
Dirk Bäumer was one of the SNiFF+ developers and it sounds a lot like
re-vitalizing some of SNiFF+ architecture, but going a step further ;-).
SNiFF+ had an integration with emacs, where SNiFF+ was a kind of
language server for external editors...

... but who cares about history, it's all about reinventing the wheel...

> and makes sure they have the
> frameworks in place that they all can reuse to make their products
> consistent, integrated, and easy to construct.

Again the Cathedral approach...

However, language server is a way to separate concerns and could bring
eclipse back into the game...

... maybe it's time again for the architecture council to talk about
architecture again ...

Michael

> And they have a
> strong product manager who knows what excites users and drives the
> development team to build those things.
>
> The Eclipse IDE team does not. That is why every IDE project does
> things slightly differently and why important features for users
> don’t get done. I love the great ideas we’re talking about
> here. They’re not worth much unless we also hear how we can get them
> done.
>
> Doug.
>