Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Integrated Development Environments

Integrated Development Environments

When they are good, they are very, very good. And when they are bad, they are horrible! Microsoft Visual Studio is so nice that it makes me stop looking down my nose at the language specification for C#.

I can't remember what Java IDE almost made me give up on the language ten years ago, but using Eclipse today makes me think it may have been an early version of Eclipse. What an incredibly obscure user interface this is. Yuck! But there is demand for Java engineers who know Eclipse--and I can see why previous Eclipse experience matters--it has a pretty stiff learning curve compared to Visual Studio.

UPDATE: Oh yes, and since I haven't done much Java the last few years, I have to remember all the subtle details. And Java 1.6 seems to be a lot better at giving warnings than Java 1.3. In particular, it used to be completely legal to simplify specify objects as being of type Vector. Now you are apparently supposed to specify the type, much like a C++ template.

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