Re: A constructive debate: Eclipse or NetBeans?

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Jon Harrop wrote:

Writing a hello world program is much harder with either Eclipse or
NetBeans. With the tools I am used to, you do (including installation of
all necessary software):

$ sudo apt-get install ocaml
$ cat >hello.ml
print_endline "Hello world!"
$ ocamlbuild hello.byte
$ ./hello.byte
Hello world!
$

With Eclipse you do:
...

As silly as it generally is to cite one's own text I don't know how else
to put it:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=34619#175257

If helloworld is really all you want, why don't you just type echo Hello
World and be happy?

Yes, I agree that Java and Eclipse require some effort to get you going,
but in real projects this really doesn't matter.

OCaml versus Java is another topic and I'm not going to discuss it here.
I'm just pointing out that your "helloworld is difficult" point is
irrelevant.

. sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk eclipse
. Run Eclipse and wait *30* seconds for it to start.
. Eclipse runs extremely unreliably and keeps crashing with null pointer
exceptions.

Do you really think this is what most Eclipse users experience? I believe
your system is broken.

. Discover that Eclipse is using the GNU Java implementation rather than
Sun's Java implementation.
. Learn how to alter the chosen Java implementation used by Eclipse by
running:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config java

This problem is not related to Java or to Eclipse at all. It's a Debian
problem at most. Or "GNU Java", I don't know. Or a local problem?

However, I actually want to develop OpenGL-based libraries and applications.
Given the enormous base of Java programmers compared to OCaml programmers,
I was surprised to discover that this is also much easier in OCaml.

For example, the following gets you a running OpenGL program in OCaml
including installation and setup of all software and libraries and complete
source code:

...

Just one example: Jake2, a Java version of Quake2
(http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html).

This is a fine example of how to do SCM. At least when I tried the source
distribution (a year or two ago), it was very easy to build the
application. Just run ant. Windows or Linux (Gentoo), no difference.

In contrast, it took me two days and several requests for help to get even a
minimal OpenGL demo working from Java and that only works from the command
line. I started by trying to find OpenGL bindings for Java but, amazingly,
none are as mature (reliable) as OCaml's LablGL and, consequently, there is
nothing of use in the Debian package repository. Apparently Sun are aware
of this deficit and they are working with SGI to resolve it.

Yes, it's a pity that things don't just work. But that's what good
examples are for, like Jake2 above.

Needless to say, this is not what I was expecting from a mainstream
language. Installing JOGL required various .properties files to be copied
to certain locations and edited, various environment variables to be set and
so forth. Even after all that, only a couple of the demos actually work.
Trying to run other people's OpenGL-based Java demos from the web I find
that all are unstable on both my Linux box and my Windows box. Asking
around, this seems to be a ubiquitous problem specific to Java.

Yes, Sun should learn from 3rd party Java projects and make things work
out of the box.

So my impressions so far are that command-line tools are much easier to use
and obviously far more powerful than these "industrial-strength" IDEs. I
believe people only use them because they feel more comfortable with a GUI
but, when the GUI is this complicated and unintuitive, I think you have to
question whether or not a command line is better.

Perhaps you should consider ditching IDEs altogether?

I think your problems have nothing to do with the IDE versus cli question.
Generally I agree: If I had to choose between cli only and gui only I
would choose cli only. But since we are allowed to combine the best of
both worlds, it's nice to have IDEs.

For me it's important to know what the IDE does for me, but some people
seem to be happy to use IDEs without this knowledge. This is a question I
have discussed in another thread a long ago:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.softwaretools/browse_frm/thread/ae2fb9c2f14367af/953c1ed9bcb8ff6a?lnk=gst&q=oikarinen#953c1ed9bcb8ff6a

- Ville Oikarinen
.

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