IDEA jilted lovers
With every new EAP, I have a brief period of intense anger and frustration. Rarely does this spillover into a good old-fashioned bile though. Unfortunately the downside of that is that all that anger and rage simply get bottled up. At this point, I am a bottle of well shaken anger and rage, and this here is my attempt to open up the cap.
How hard can it possibly be to have a release that kind of sort of works? Sure, 944 worked sometimes. 957 also vaguely works. Those of you who insist that they work flawlessly can fuck off, your joy is of no comfort to me. Really though, the quality is abysmal. After all that excitement and eagerness in the run-up to 957, imagine my surprise and dismay to find that it’s a hell of a lot less usable than 944 for me.
As tedious as it’s become to endlessly repeat this, I feel compelled to point out that there aren’t any new features I’m gleeful about (new junit is nice, cvs is still sometimes more annoying than the old version). So the ONLY thing I look forward to in new EAPs is stability. At this point, I don’t think this is an unreasonable expectation. We’re told that the final release of 4.0 will be out in 6 weeks or so. Within the first 10 minutes of using 957 I had filed 4 bugs (via the lovely auto-reporter). These were all new bugs that didn’t happen in 944. Of course, there were still some old favourites that happened in 944 that still pop up for entertainment value in 957.
There’s also a general feeling of malaise and stagnancy about the whole thing (which might well exist only in my mind, I concede). Features present in 3.0.x have been in the process of being ‘reworked’ for months now. There is a very vague promise of opening up the J2EE API ‘at some point’, despite the fact that previously we had reasonably functional generic EJB support that is now restricted to Weblogic only. We had compile to sources and multiple output paths. We had up to date javadocs for the open API. We had all the developers that have now moved onto bigger and better things (the 2-3 new products they’re working on). Love was in the air, back in those days.
I love IDEA. I love it passionately and intensely, I love it enough that I’m willing to hunt down and kill Eclipse people in the name of IDEA. That love unfortunately places a great burden on it; it can hurt me so easily, the slightest insults and inconveniences are seen as major betrayals and disappointments. I can’t help but repeat that hackneyed old phrase…..I miss the good old days.
October 21st, 2003 at 1:31 pm
There’s bugs in the EAP? No shit Sherlock, it’s an EAP. Bile away about bugs in a release version, but you can’t get that upset about bugs in beta code. If it’s hurting you too much, just go back to 3.0.x.
October 21st, 2003 at 2:36 pm
I still don’t understand why you hate Eclipse so much, so, why not spew the usual amount of bile over it? Should be interesting to see the new generation of the editor wars. Emacs and VI fights seem so… outdated…
October 21st, 2003 at 2:48 pm
Everybody always seems to get so worked up over which java code editor to use. What a waste of time. Use the one you feel helps you most. There are only a few basic requirements you need for a decent editor: syntax highlighting, code completion, instant compile, formatting, and the ability to run an ant script. Othen than those basic requirements, the rest is just bloat and will only increase the probability for performance problems and more bugs.
October 21st, 2003 at 3:34 pm
If it is any consolation, Hani, I appreciate your time, pain, blood, sweat, tears, suffering and restarts. If it weren’t for your sacrifices and tedious bug reporting, I wouldn’t have the greatest IDE on earth running non-stop for a full week, every week without problems.
For that, I thank thee.
October 21st, 2003 at 4:38 pm
Just shut up and use Eclipse. You will be so much more productive.
Of course, anyone who uses pre-release code and complains about stability is someone that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
October 21st, 2003 at 5:36 pm
To the enlightened one:
Yeah, code completion in editor, how useful can it be, I wonder. I mean, without the source parser that is the core of any IDE? If you think that some regexp can solve that, I say you’re a rookie. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
October 21st, 2003 at 6:23 pm
Hey, reading your blog, one might get the idea that you’re unable to get a single fricken application to work.
You must be a retard ;-)
October 21st, 2003 at 6:57 pm
If you’re going to insult someone, why the smiley? Do it or don’t.
October 22nd, 2003 at 6:40 am
Wake up! Why support a closed-source industry when there is a viable, almost-as-good-and-with-your-help-better, free Eclipse available? Are you set in your ways, inflexible, incapable of seeing the truth? I think not! So gather your strength, change is not always pleasant, and take the plunge.
October 22nd, 2003 at 8:40 am
Shit, seems that i am nearly the only one commenting with my real name. I must be stupid or worse, not paranoid enough.
First of all, all you eclipse guys, your IDE is nice, but without great tuning steps, its quite unusable. Things like “Showing errors which are allready resolved” or “Errors go away only on save” seem a bit cumbersome. Nearly all my customers from the IBM field use Eclipse and all i see is total frustration, but they are IBM customers and they are used to strange behaviors ;-)
But the funniest thing about eclipse is the “localisation of the commands”. You can only do wild guessing if some refactoring items do what they say. Most of the words are not in the german vocabulary at all.
Regarding IDEA, hell i dont even have the time to test the EAPs, i only tested one 3 months ago to make a first contact with Generics. I still hope that the new CVS implementation is better than the old one, the current one is far away from real CVS clients like WinCVS, even eclipse does a better job here.
Enough IDE trash talking, i must return to the second screen where IDEA is allready waiting.
October 22nd, 2003 at 9:03 am
Hani, I usually agree with what you biled, but this time I must disagree. EAP is just that, beta code. There is no promise of stability or that it will make you go gaa-gaa like a 10-year old kid in a candy store. I remember when IDEA was doing EAPs for the 3.0 version and it was also unstable, unusable, and slow. Now people (including you) claim the 3.0.x releases can run for hours before requiring a restart. Hmmm… this tells me they are doing something right?
I do agree that they need to improve the core product (better support of J2EE and app servers, Ant, JUnit, plug-ins API, refactoring, performance, etc) instead of building new features like Aspect that a very small group of people use.
October 22nd, 2003 at 9:25 am
I’m also on OSX.. Only started with the EAP’s with 944, but 944 and 957 have been good to me so far (i’m not exercising the new JUnit integration heavily).
I haven’t had any problems with the installers, they have all been double-clickable.
October 22nd, 2003 at 2:03 pm
FIRST POST!!!!!
October 22nd, 2003 at 10:31 pm
Other great IDE that is simple, stable, supports instant compiling (generates class files only for running), refactoring, the latest generics, integrates with tomcat and ant, etc. – generally meets 90/10 needs without making it too complex is … CodeGuide.
October 23rd, 2003 at 4:09 am
Jon: “Wake up! Why support a closed-source industry when there is a viable, almost-as-good-and-with-your-help-better, free Eclipse available? Are you set in your ways, inflexible, incapable of seeing the truth?”
Yes, and further, why support a “closed house” industry by buying a house? I want one of those for free too. Oh, and a car, I’d like a free Porsche, please. I deserve it. After all, I submitted a patch once to Porsche.
I have finally seen the truth, and the truth has set me free. Or at least made me think that everything should be free. I’m gonna party like it’s 1917. Peace.
October 23rd, 2003 at 9:42 am
>The 3.0.x releases can run for hours before >requiring a restart.
Is that all??
I haven’t restarted Eclipse for over a week, and I’m running the 3.0 beta.
October 23rd, 2003 at 11:28 am
Out of curiosity, was 911 a good build?
Those numbers all look remarkably Porsche like…
October 23rd, 2003 at 11:44 am
911 was certainly not good in New York
October 23rd, 2003 at 2:11 pm
You love IDEA…better, go and love a real women :)
October 23rd, 2003 at 4:26 pm
You love IDEA…better, go and love a real women :)
October 23rd, 2003 at 4:39 pm
Cameron: Your analogy is not quite right. There are no free houses to choose from. There are free, good IDE’s. I don’t want a free Porsche. But if I had a choice between a free almost-Porche and a Porche, I would choose the free one. That doesn’t make me cheap, just sensible.
October 24th, 2003 at 9:20 am
Jon: So what you are saying is that it is sensible to always pick the so-called “free product”, even if the free almost-Porsche runs like crap, breaks down every 300 miles, and comes with no warranty. Whoever makes a decision based solely on price is not sensible, just cheap and retarded. People who claims “open-source” or “freeware” are always superior than “closed-source” just don’t get it. Businesses make decision on a purchase based on many factors – support, quality, time-to-market, price, etc. In fact, price is often not the major factor.
I am more than happy to pay for an IDE (within reason of course) that makes me productive and don’t make me slam the keyboard in frustration, than to use a free product that I don’t like. If Eclipse works for you, great. If Emacs works for you, great. The main thing is there are choices, and not everyone wants or needs the same thing.
October 27th, 2003 at 10:20 am
And, more worryingly, I have had regular-but-difficult-to-reproduce problems where UNDO (Ctrl-z) completely shags my source.
THAT is not confidence inspiring…..
-N
November 4th, 2003 at 6:56 am
relax buddy, you’ll live longer
November 5th, 2003 at 1:58 am
relax buddy, you’ll live longer