Been There, Done That

As a longtime developer, I can be pretty jaded about things. But when it comes to developer tools, it’s not the tools I’ve grown weary of, it’s the complaining.

Before getting into Apple development, I used to edit a developer website for Sun Microsystems and O’Reilly Media called java.net. This was a site with feature articles, news items, and a repository of open source projects. Because Sun’s stuff was on there, we naturally did a lot of coverage of their IDE, which was called NetBeans. But within the Java community at the time, there was a holy war between NetBeans and another IDE named Eclipse.

The Eclipse fans were not always diplomatic in their distaste for NetBeans, which is a diplomatic way of saying they were vulgar, toxic zealots about it. They didn’t just dislike NetBeans, they hated it. They hated the application, hated the people who worked on it, and hated anyone who said they liked it. They made everything personal. It wasn’t about the difference between lightweight and heavyweight rendering of UI components, it was about US VERSUS THEM.

But over the years, a funny thing happened. Android hit the scene and initially adopted Eclipse as its IDE of choice. Yet, in recent years Google has pushed it aside in favor of a new IDE, “Android Studio.” And all of a sudden, I see developers on that side of the fence saying how great Studio is compared to Eclipse. And how Eclipse sucks. And how Eclipse has always sucked.

To which I’m like… “Really? Because you pretty much used to say that I’d be committing professional malpractice if I didn’t use Eclipse.”

This was the point at which I officially stopped listening to the mob when it comes to the relative merits of IDEs.