On 09/07/2016 04:44 PM, Ned Twigg
wrote:
Anyone else have any stories from switchers? Not
forum trolls, but technical decision makers?
I talk to both, regularly. I have to admit I enjoy it by the way.
I'll try to explain a few things I was told that were quite
interesting.
Decision makers feel like there is an ROI with IntelliJ: developers
spend less time caring about their IDE and maintaining it (finding
plugins, setting preferences...). If you count the time most people
need to spend tweaking or fixing their IDE, it can easily reach a
cost of 500$/person/year. However, I'm not sure this time spent in
configuring the IDE is time that would be turned by developers into
value anyway, or if it's just more time to spend on Twitter or
Facebook (I don't believe a modern IDE is the bottleneck of
developer productivity).
Developers who switched to IntelliJ usually enjoy the ergonomics, as
mentioned in the article. IntelliJ (and NetBeans) have a better
culture of who's the average user and a better "empathy" than we
have in the Eclipse community. The result is Eclipse IDE has very
powerful unusable tools, whereas IJ has weak tools that everyone can
use. If you calculate (number of users able to deal with this
feature) * (value of the feature), in many cases in an organization,
IJ shows a better score.
If we want it on the Eclipse side, then it means everyone has to
start really listening to users, reduce their level of patience and
knowledge when designing interactions. Just being "dumber" when
being a user gives great ideas of how to make bet UX.
Another thing I've heard, from "real-life forum trolls" who changed
on their own without a company push is that they just changed "to
see" without particularly any reason against Eclipse IDE, just to
follow the hype; and liked it enough to stay. However, those ones
might easily switch back to Eclipse IDE as soon as they get bored by
IntelliJ.
Another reason is that the HTML and _javascript_ (and Typescipt and
CSS) editors of IntelliJ are much better in every mean. Some people
started to buy WebStorm because of that, really got a productivity
boost when coding and that raise the entry barrier for coding thanks
to good completion, error report, navigation... (this is only for
Web, false for Java). Obviously they kept it and since they started
to understand the IJ way, they naturally adopted it also for Java,
since there is more pain than value for having 2 distinct IDEs in
most cases.
And finally, a big reason is many people were entering into Eclipse
because of ADT. Now that the official tool is Android Studio, that's
a big amount of users missing from Eclipse, and that are trained to
IntelliJ and family. So IntelliJ becomes their "natural" IDE for
about anything and some new Android developers nowadays will never
even know about Eclipse IDE.
Somes user have already noticed that the performance was no more a
criteria for one or the other, but it takes some time to make
everyone aware of it and forgive for their previous bad experiences.
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