Browsing the directory reveals an incredible diversity of plugins. Many of them are unsurprising, but the fringe cases suggest just how large the surface area of this ecosystem really is:
- There’s a plugin for editing Wikipedia articles.
- There’s a VNC plugin, so I can manage remote machines without leaving Eclipse.
- There’s a plugin that allows me to play minesweeper within Eclipse.
In fact, as I looked through this list of plugins, I started to realize that Eclipse is basically a modern Emacs. The true die-hard Emacs users want to do everything within Emacs. One of my coworkers likes to edit /etc/passwd and set emacs to be his shell. Eclipse seems to be heading in the same direction.
http://software.ericsink.com/entries/java_eclipse_4.html
A wonderfully perceptive observation by Eric Sink. Everyone is jumping aboard Eclipse as the standard IDE platform. Even disregarding the plethora of plugins for uses of only tangential relevance to programming, there are companies like Actuate (business intelligence) and WindRiver (embedded software) choosing to use Eclipse as their base platform, rather than their own.
I think Eclipse is a wonderful development platform. I’ve been following it’s progress since 2.0 (circa 2002), and decided that it was worth switching from vim to Eclipse, for general Java coding, with the 2.1 release. I do wonder, however, when the inevitable bloat will set in. As with corporations, there is a point where popularity compels one to maintain and enhance the status quo, rather than trim the fat or the accumulated excesses. This is also the same problem that plagues large, consensus-based working groups: in trying to please everyone, one can add incrementally, and never remove.
