Re: A constructive debate: Eclipse or NetBeans?

"Jeroen Wenting" <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote:
I actually found this extremely shocking because so many people complain
that Linux and command-line driven languages like OCaml are so much more
difficult to use and they miss a good IDE. So I think I should give some
specific examples.

That's because most people never learn to use a command line or a simple
text editor.

Wow, ok.

Had you had the same expertise in Java that you do in Ocalm you'd have got
it working faster.
So your comparison isn't valid.

I quantified the steps I took. I believe they are all necessary. Can you get
a working result in fewer steps?

For example, there is no need to manually copy setup files to your home
directory and edit them before running the build system and there is no
need to download dependencies manually.

If you want to compare with other technologies that I am less familiar with
then I'll draw the comparison with .NET. In F#, the command-line hello
world program is:

printf "Hello world!"

and the GUI Hello world program is:

Application.Run(new Form(Text="Hello world"))

I found .NET/VS vastly easier to learn than Java/Eclipse.

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.

JOGL isn't Java.

JOGL reflects that facts that Java bundles nothing of use in this domain and
makes it prohibitively difficult to write decent libraries.

In contrast, look how easy it is to use MDX, WPF and even OpenGL from C# in
VS. For MDX and WPF, everything you need is even bundled with the IDE.

If the designers of the library made those decisions, don't blame Java for
it...

JOGL is backed by Sun (the creators of Java) and SGI (the creators of
OpenGL). If they are having so much trouble writing bindings to OpenGL for
Java that work (even if they remain years out of date) then that doesn't
exactly bode well for anyone else...

Also don't blame Java for your lack of experience using it.

Like many people, I find OpenGL, OCaml, C#, F# and many other languages and
tools easy to use but Java and JOGL hard. What else is there to blame
except the only common factor - Java?

Indeed, of the few Java+OpenGL projects that I have been able to find only
one worked (Jake2). My lack of experience clearly has no bearing on that
result.

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.

It's better, for some things. It's far less productive, for others.

Is there anything language-agnostic that is more difficult with a command
line?

Perhaps you should consider ditching IDEs altogether?

Maybe you should consider ditching the anti-Java ranting based on nothing
but a flawed experiment designed around a desired result to make Java (and
IDEs) look bad?

That is just paranoia dressed up as a cognitive point.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
.

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