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

Re:Getters and setters

[AdamHaun]

Tangential question: What's the advantage of having getters and setters vs. just accessing the variable directly? If automatically generating getters and setters is just an easy/common thing, what function do they really serve?

I've only done OO programming in college (I do embedded C now), so I'm assuming there's some real-world advantage that I'm not aware of.