Thoughts on Guido's ITC audio interview

[Markus Wankus]

Stephen Toledo-Brown wrote:
> Tony Meyer wrote:
> 
>>> Everyone complaining about Eclipse in this thread needs to go try 
>>> 3.1. The interface is much much much more responsive.
>>
>>
>>
>> The problem with Eclipse, IMO, is Java.  I've tried 3.1 on a WinXP 
>> machine
>> and, like just about any Java program, it's incredibly slow and a real 
>> pain
>> to use.  On a (similarly spec'd) Mac OS X Tiger machine, it runs nice and
>> smoothly and is reasonably nice to use.  I'd happily recommend that Mac
>> users try Eclipse, but never a Windows (Python) programmer.
> 
> 
> I've not tried Mac, but under both Windows and Linux on x86, I find 
> Eclipse (3.0) is slow with less than 1.25 GB of RAM, reasonably fast 
> with 1.5GB or more. Processor speed and disk speed don't seem to be 
> anywhere near as important.

I guess we all have different views on "slow".  I have been using it to 
develop a full IDE in Eclipse for over 2 years (since 2.1), and I can't 
understand where you guys are coming from.  I self-host (run a 
development Eclipse SDK, plus a Runtime - that's 2 Eclipse's 
running...sometimes 3) all day every day and it does admittedly get 
"slow", but only down when I am doing serious debugging (Eclipse 
debugging the internals of Eclipse).

I only have 512MB RAM, and a wimpy 1.3 GHz Athlon on Windows.  And BTW - 
if you used Eclipse seriously, you would know that Mac and Linux are 
inherently slower than Windows due to the SWT GUI library lagging 
performance-wise on those platforms (especially GTK on Linux), so I have 
no idea how you can resonably say that you would *never* recommend a 
Windows programmer to try Eclipse.  Those types of performance claims 
are simply not true (beyond a 10 minute evaluation), and it's just plain 
silly to say Eclipse is not usable on Windows.

My opinion - If you aren't willing to try something new, or have an 
aversion to it in the first place, nothing we can say will change your 
mind.  As for me - I'll continue to enjoy the benefits of Eclipse's 
tools - especially with PyDev coming along the way it is.

The ultimate would be for something like Jython or JPype to come to 
fruition so Eclipse plugins could be written in Python.  Now *that* 
would be something.  Actually, the *ultimate* would be to implement the 
equivalent of Eclipse in Python, but that is a pipe dream... ;o)

Markus.