Visual Studio vs. Eclipse: a Programmer's Comparison

Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell is back with a comparison of Eclipse and Visual Studio, picking through some common complaints about both platforms and comparing their respective features. 'First, let's talk about usability,' he writes, 'and let's be frank: Neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio is a model for sound usability.' That being said, as an open-source project, Eclipse wins some points for its customizability and compatibility with languages; it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years. Microsoft choosing to eliminate macros in recent versions of Visual Studio has also led to some programmer frustrations (and a need for external tools)."

Comments

Out of the box

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of the box, VS wins hands-down.

Um excuse me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in ....

A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in anything.

vi.

gedit.

emacs/xemacs

Pencil and paper.

And on very VERY rare occasions, I've seen developers who did everything their head and just typed in any old text editor.

Re:Um excuse me ...

[bertok]

Well, I'd never hire you in the first place, because modern IDEs are the automation of the software development world and demonstrably improve productivity while lowering error rates.

You're basically saying that we should let the guys in the warehouse manhandle 500kg loads by hand because they "prefer" not to use the forklifts. We should just let them do whatever they please, because that's what makes for good management, right?

I've been in mixed work environments before where everyone just used whatever tools they wanted: Linux, Windows, Mac, Vi, Emacs, etc... I personally used IntelliJ IDEA on Windows because it had code analysis and safe refactoring. My productivity was at least 50x higher than other developers. I was told not to submit changes too fast because the code reviewers couldn't keep up. Note that I didn't say I was 50x better than anyone else -- there were smarter and more experienced developers there -- but I was running circles around them because of the tools that I was using. A woodcarver, no matter how skilled in his art, simply cannot keep up with a CNC milling machine. A blacksmith cannot possibly outproduce a ten ton press that can stamp out a part every five seconds.

Inefficiencies were everywhere: they took 30 seconds to check out a file from source control using a command-line tool, whereas I could just start typing with a barely noticeable pause on the first character as the IDE does it for me. They used "diff", I used a GUI 3-way merge tool that syntax highlighted and could ignore whitespaces in a semantically aware way. There was one particularly funny moment when some guy walked up to me to ask me to look into a bug in a specific method. He starts off with the usual "now go to the xyz folder, abc subfolder, now somewhere in here there's a..." meanwhile I'm staring at him patiently because I had opened the file before he'd even finished giving me the full method name at the start of his spiel. Global, indexed, semantic-aware, prefix search with jump to file is a feature of IntelliJ IDEA, not Emacs or Vi. He's never even heard of such a thing! Thought it was magic. Grep couldn't have found the method anywhere near as fast, not through 30 million lines of code anyway, and then it would have returned every reference to the method name as well, not just the method definition itself. Then I'd have to find the damned file in a haystack of thousands and open it manually anyway.

Minutes of work in a seconds, hours in minutes.

It's not about typing, or shortcuts, or block select, or the specific dialect of regular expressions in your favorite text editor. It's about indexing, refactoring, code analysis, live error highlights, popup-help, tab-complete, source control integration, boilerplate generation, integrated debuggers, and a thousand other things that most programming oriented text editors simply do not have. It's about letting the CPU in your computer do what it is there for, instead of just waiting patiently for the next keyboard interrupt so that it can use all 3 gigahertz of power to put a byte into a buffer and then go back to sleep.

It's not even a good idea to let developers pick their favorite IDE either, because there are productivity gains to be had from consistency. Training is cheaper, licenses can be purchased in bulk, plugins will work for everyone, custom extensions may be cost-effective to develop for one IDE but not many, etc...

Conclusion: meh

[Aviancer]

So the conclusion is "both work; each has some flakiness".

That's a long-winded way of saying "meh".

vi or emacs debates anyone?

Left out MyEclipse and IntelliJ

[Kagato]

You're comparing an expensive IDE to a free one. I'd be more interested how it compares to a curated Eclipse experience like MyEclipse or a closed source IDE like IntelliJ. All that being said, Eclipse is mostly used by folks using Java or languages that run in the JVM. Visual Studio is going to be used by those on a Microsoft stack.

Re:Studio v. Eclipse

[lgw]

VS was the best debugger in the business, and if you're stuck with a legacy code base that's arguably the most important part of an IDE. And back when MSDN was installed with VS (instead of being a web site) it was amazing for its time, because you could select any library function name and with a keystroke get really well written docs for that library function fast. I used to have half my screen for code and half for the doc pane. Once it became wait-a-few-seconds-for-the web-page, that advantage was lost.