Eclipse is a dead system
by Josh Staiger
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Steve Yegge has a thought-provoking essay on living systems vs. dead systems: systems that can be modified at runtime vs. systems that you have to kill first to modify.
In this context Eclipse is a "dead system" or "hardware" as Stevey says. And this makes me sad :(
Though Eclipse has a world-class extension system, we go through an onerous process of launching and relaunching Eclipse to make the slightest change to a plugin.
In contrast, a "living" system like Emacs doesn't have this problem. We can evaluate s-expression, set variables, rewrite functions, and swap code on the fly without having to relaunch — one reason writing Emacs extensions is easier and more fun than writing Eclipse extensions, despite the elisp.
Stevey also draws a parallel between how long a system can stay running without reboot, and how long people will continue to use the system.
*shrug*
I think it has more to do with how well your system solves people's problems on any given day. But here's the thing: the problems of today aren't necessarily the problems of tomorrow, nor the problems of ten years from now.
The more malleable your system, the better its chance of solving the problems of 2007, and 2008, and 2017, and 2027. And systems that can be modified without a reboot are much easier to modify and far more malleable than systems that can't.
Eclipse has many advantages over Emacs (more intuitive, better gui, less baggage), but as ugly as Emacs looks on the outside, it's the more malleable of the two. If I had to pick which will be around in 100 years, my money is on Emacs. And with history as a guide, that's probably not a bad bet.
UPDATE:
As Bill points out in the comments, I feel like a bastard for writing this post (especially the inflammatory title). But my aim isn't to disparage Eclipse. I love Eclipse. It's a great platform, and it's very good at what it does.
And no... it's certainly not "dying" :)
My aim is to point out that there are other kinds of extensibility out there that we don't get with Eclipse... at least not right now, and it's the kind of extensibility I'd very much like to see.
For full disclosure, I work for IBM — the company that founded the Eclipse project. All views expressed here are my own.