Recently, I found myself switching back and forth between the three major Java (and Scala) IDE. Why? The bloat is intolerable. At the risk of stepping on the toe of the Eclipse and Intellij’s fanbois, I have to say that only NetBeans offers a consistent, acceptably-performant experience for Java server programming. Eclipse has been my favorite since 2001, and I have even developed a fair amount of Eclipse plugins in the 2003-2006 time frame (not open sourced, unfortunately), but with the last few releases, Eclipse can barely run without having me stop typing at every other few character, while waiting for Eclipse to respond. Its performance would be fine if I uninstall most of the useful plugins for development, and keep it to a minimum. Intellij is a little better, but not much. But Intellij’s single window per project model is really annoying, and not to mention its most stupid refactoring feature. NetBeans has been quite consistent, with some lagging here and there. But… but, its font handling mechanism is so last-century! Every single project I have worked on need to do extensive localization, and NetBeans’ incapacity to render multilingual contents properly is turning me off.
And with Scala projects, NetBeans just drops out of the game. The Scala plugin for NetBeans has been dropped, which is unfortunate, and Oracle has no plan on this matter. I have to continuously go back to good old Emacs with Ensime. And then, sbt is … let’s just say, an abomination.That word is not even strong enough to describe my feeling for it. Despite the fact that the three-letter name stands for “Simple Build Tool”, it’s anything but simple, and its package and repository resolution algorithm is seriously lacking.
What kind of machine do I work on, you may ask? Well, I work mostly on my two years old laptop, a Thinkpad X250, with a decent SSD disk and 8G of RAM. What? As a professional programmer, you don’t even have a machine with 256G of RAM, 4-way CPU with 16-core each, and a graphic card that can second as a BBQ grill? No, and I think there’s no shame in admitting that. That laptop is certainly not the top of the line, but it is quite decent. And frankly, we used to be able to run Eclipse and a bunch of other server software at the same time, developing very large projects, on a machine that had one twentieth of the hardware configuration that I have now. Upon hearing my grouse, a cynical friend responded by saying that, at that time, he used to go to the movie, paying only five cents for a ticket, a popcorn and a soda, and the cinema had no sound.
Ten years is probably a long time for computer development, but seriously, have we really progressed that much in the last ten years? Or we just don’t care about our codes and tools anymore?