Having now converted my development environment to Eclipse, I’m going through the normal growing pains associated with going from a total command line “edit, save, exit, compile, look at error, re-edit…” cycle to a totally integrated interactive IDE. The last immersion I did in this type of environment was using Turbo Pascal 7 somewhere back in the mid 90’s.
Mostly it’s going okay, but I’m sort of entertained at the ‘compile on the fly’ functionality that Eclipse has. Errors are shown immediately, not at compile-time, so you can see the state of your app at any moment. I just find some of my conversations with Eclipse amusing. The ‘Problems’ pane at the bottom of the screen shows the current state, and I feel like I see this sort of convo happening all the time:
dbs – typeitytypetyptyp type type. think. typetype
eclipse – Warning: variable foobar is never used.
dbs – yes yes, i know. I’m still working on it.
eclipse – Warning: you type too slow.
dbs – You’re not helping.
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the “Dave. Your code is absolute garbage.” HAL-like plugin will be available.
About Dave Shevett
A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.
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A built in peanut gallery! 😉
Eclipse rocks on toast. Damnably slow on anything less than first-class hardware, though.
I could see a plugin that tells you things like “Are you sure you want to use inheritance here and not encapsulation?” Maybe with a little talking paperclip… ok, maybe not.
I’m not sure about the ‘first-class hardware’. The kicker for it is memory. I’m runnin gon a 1.6gig laptop now full time, and it really is quite useable (and I’m doing a HELLUVA lot of other stuff too).
But, I did bump the memory to 2gig 🙂