Instructions? I ain't got no need for `em! I don't need no Instructions! I don't have to read your stinking instructions!bastardized from "Treasure of the Sierra Madre"
I know I'm not the only one around who hardly ever reads the instructions for software nowadays, and I think there's a good reason. A lot of the documentation these days makes the assumption that you've come out of your WWII fallout shelter for the first time in 50-60 years and the first thing you want to do is use photoshop.
And for a while, things were good.
Then I installed the new Eclipse 3.1. I started a new java project, added a file, did the obligatory "hello world" application. and tried to run the app.
But the run function wasn't where I thought it would be. Aroo? This window shows me what programs it would use to run it, but it's not running?! My gut reflex was "Well, this sucks, I'm uninstalling." followed immediately by, "wait, give up on something just because it doesn't work the way I thought it would, when I haven't read a thing about it since it was in first beta?"
So I sat down, started with one of it's tutorials of running with it, and in no time, "Hello World" was glaring at me from the console tab within the program.
Neat!
The Java IDE's I've used in the past were kludgy, often written in Java, memory instensive, and wouldn't do what MSVS could for it's languages with half the overhead.
Today's Eclipse is much, much better. "Code proofing" while you type, preformatting as you go, a lot of what Eclipse does for you is quite slick, and the overhead is not as bad percentage-wise as older IDE's were(At least it didn't require me to install Apache or IIS unlike other IDE's I can think of).
The only catch was that I needed to learn a little about "planet Eclipse"(to paraphrase a former co-worker) before I dived into it. But if you do any coding using Java or C++(which I haven't tried yet), I really recommend it. The price is nice as well.
Posted by Jeffrey at July 6, 2005 11:16 AM