I love Eclipse.

[Isaac]

First, I just want to say why I now hate the Twilight chick-flick junk on google. There's either a book or a movie called Eclipse, and if I forget to add -twilight to my searches I always that garbage. And while I'm on that topic, the fact that Pyjamas (for Python) is an accepted way of spelling Pajamas, on the Moon, makes finding tutorials more difficult... Yeah. There are Pyjama tutorials that aren't programming related. HAHAHAH!

Yeah, anyway.

Eclipse is awesome! I love writing in it. There so much hate against Eclipse on the internet and it was the only thing keeping me from using it. So finally, while trying to figure out the best way to write in different web languges on the same project, it dawned on me that I should try out one of the free IDEs.

Someone recommended Spyder, or Spyderlib, and I just couldn't make it work. I really couldn't tell how to make it work with Javascript. It was clear that it was designed for Python, but I want to do more than just work with Python, in the future. I have it installed still, but I don't plan on using it until I see a real benefit.

I ran the sudo apt-get install eclipse command and
<silly> Then up over the white peaked mountains of... east Texas... there was a light! I climbed up and saw a glimmering sword. Wind swirling around it, like an invisible brush painting with snow. I tossedth my rusty Gedit dagger aside and claimed Eclipse, sword of slightly better UI! </silly>

Seriously, though. I love that my classes and functions are picked up immediately by autocomplete. The trace-back errors actually trace to something. And it's suppose to be friendly with a bunch of different APIs, which I plan on using.

[Sirius]

First, I just want to say why I now hate the Twilight chick-flick junk on google. There's either a book or a movie called Eclipse, and if I forget to add -twilight to my searches I always that garbage.

Ouch. I can imagine your pain.

But yes, I was very impressed with Eclipse when I started using it a few years back. Makes the art of programming that much less error-prone when you're trying to do it quickly. It took VS quite a while to catch up, actually, and it still doesn't have quite as strong refactoring capabilities (thinking of C# here; basically no refactoring in C++, but considering the language, that probably isn't surprising).

[karx11erx]

VS could just as well offer refactoring for C++, but I guess MS wants to push C#. Apart from refactoring I never found Eclipse quite up to par with VS; it's pretty goid though and sure nice to have something like that on Linux.

[Sirius]

Yeah, they kind of do ... you can't replace C++, but C# is more or less their "solution" for general-purpose applications, similar to how Java is seeing more use for this in the non-MS world.

For better or for worse.

[Isaac]

The biggest app I ever wrote in python was roughly six classes, loaded with functions, to manage user sessions and about seven applications. But I never felt I needed it refracted. Maybe it's something lower level languages need.

[fliptw]

Macros are the main issue wrt to automated refactoring in C++.

[Sirius]

Refactoring is generally something large applications are most likely to need, whether written in a low- or high-level language. I can see a six-class application not being an issue - at that size it's pretty easy to keep the whole thing in your head from start to finish.

P.S. Though I should note it's not limited to large applications. I've frequently had to refactor smaller programs when I started with a prototype or proof-of-concept to ensure that what I wanted to do was really possible, then had to turn that into a program or library that was actually useful.

[Verran]

God, I can't live without Resharper, which means I'll never use VS Express. *grumble* *walks away*

[R e v]

If you like Eclipse, and you appear to prefer Python, I recomment AptanaStudio3 (http://www.aptana.com/)

It's based on Eclipse, but much more refined and manageable, imo.

[Jeff250]

In general, you can't automatically refactor C++ due to the halting problem (recognizing the grammar is formally undecidable).

If you use eclipse, you might want to just download the tarball from their site, as the Ubuntu maintained version is usually quite out of date. I can't imagine programming Java without eclipse, since that language is so tediously verbose. Rest assured, for C/python/etc., I use vim though.

[Isaac]

here's an update..


Using eclipse for working on projects on a restricted ftp account isn't very good. The auto complete also has problems because it wants to reference the python version installed on your computer and not the one on the server, which is an older customized version and isn't one I have direct access to.

Gedit is king when it comes to editing on the server. Nothing beats it. Here's why.
I open any file with it on my ftp account and edit something. I then have to save, by hitting ctrl+s. Every other text editor on the planet, or at least all the ones I've been trying, have to freeze while they're saving! This is really annoying since it can take a whole 6 seconds to save something small. While Gedit is saving I can still move around the page, scrolling up and down.

As for vim... I like it, but I have not yet figured out how to use vim easily on my ftp server with the command line

[Sirius]

In general, you can't automatically refactor C++ due to the halting problem (recognizing the grammar is formally undecidable).

Is this because of macros? Maybe not just macros?

[fliptw]

here's an update..


Using eclipse for working on projects on a restricted ftp account isn't very good. The auto complete also has problems because it wants to reference the python version installed on your computer and not the one on the server, which is an older customized version and isn't one I have direct access to.

Gedit is king when it comes to editing on the server. Nothing beats it. Here's why.
I open any file with it on my ftp account and edit something. I then have to save, by hitting ctrl+s. Every other text editor on the planet, or at least all the ones I've been trying, have to freeze while they're saving! This is really annoying since it can take a whole 6 seconds to save something small. While Gedit is saving I can still move around the page, scrolling up and down.

As for vim... I like it, but I have not yet figured out how to use vim easily on my ftp server with the command line

FTP is a protocol for uploading and downloading. Its not a file system. Do your work locally, and then update when you are confident everything works.

[fliptw]

In general, you can't automatically refactor C++ due to the halting problem (recognizing the grammar is formally undecidable).

Is this because of macros? Maybe not just macros?

Templates too. It undecidable because of the multiple places in the C++ tool chain where decisions are made about what the final code will look like.

then you have to decide on how to do the refactoring - you could do all of it using macros if you really hate the rest of humanity.

[Sirius]

Other languages have templates... but it probably is true that you can't do all the same things with them.

P.S. I'm impressed that I somehow managed to miss the start of the thread and repeat it just 10 posts later. Goin' for gold, folks...

[Jeff250]

For instance, there's no way to write an infinite loop using C macros, so they aren't Turing complete.