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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)."
Eclipse struggled a bit with the Eclipse 4 release but the new version Kepler is fantastic.
Visual Studio is great if you're developing for Microsoft platforms.
Fortunately, Microsoft platforms are growing less relevant by the day.
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Out of the box, VS wins hands-down.
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.
And I *freeze*refu*freeze*se to h*freeze*ave anyo*freeze*ne tell me di*freeze*fferently. *freeze*.
Eclipse IS slow, period. I work with him for over six years and has ALWAYS been slow compared with a similar IDE that is not based on Java. And not only slow, but terribly buggy. TFA sounds more like an article made by an eclipse fanboy than a developer trying to make a truly honest comparison.
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It isn't nearly as popular (and I don't know why), but Netbeans kicks Eclipses ass. True, they are both memory hogs. But Netbeans doesn't drag and freeze as much. Its commands and interface are a lot more intuitive. Netbeans is also a much better IDE for the web. It handles JavaScript way better than Eclipse and even allows you to debug your JavaScript through a Chrome extension.
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For all of those that love Visual Studio for C++ programming, and having used eclipse for some time, I believe Qt Creator is by far a much better alternative, as it has around the same level of functionality of VS+expensive commercial plugins.
Even letting the Qt integration out, It has excellent code completion, shows warnings and errors as you type, provides great refactoring tools, It's extremely lightweight, works with any compiler and any build system, in any platform, integrates with a wide array of debuggers and profilers, has a high degree of customization, and some unique features like the best search/replace I've ever used and the locator (ctrl-k).
The only reason it's not more popular is that most people believes it's only useful for writing Qt applications, which couldn't be further away from the truth. It's simply awesome. If I worked for Digia, I'd try to change the name and promote it to something unrelated to Qt, that way it would be really easy to bring new developers to their platform.
So the conclusion is "both work; each has some flakiness".
That's a long-winded way of saying "meh".
vi or emacs debates anyone?
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.
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.
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One advantage is that it makes it easier on you if in the future you realize that you need to do any sort of validation or other logic that's not directly related to the accessing or mutating of a property's value, but needs to happen every time that property is accessed or mutated. If you were already calling 'getValue()' whenever you wanted 'value', all you have to do is add the new logic to the 'getValue()' method. It also allows you to have a private scoped object property while still making the property accessible to outside classes. Once again, you might want to do this so that you can always ensure that a value being set as the value of the property is valid and sanitized (if the property were public, any other class could directly change its value without the guarantee of the new value being valid).
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
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