On 09/15/2016 05:17 PM, Eric Moffatt
wrote:
The idea of e4 was to simplify the platform code to the point
where we could allow contributors to 'get in the game' and to be
*successful*. It's worth noting in this context that in 2015 the
Platform UI project was voted the 'Most Open' having garnered
many new committers from diverse sources (I'm not sure but I
suspect we have more now than ever before).
As a relatively new regular contributor to Platform UI, I must say
that what made the project more open to me are more the changes
about releng (move to Tycho) and contribution infra (Hudson, Gerrit)
than the move to e4. On the "higher level" parts of the IDE (Wizard,
views, and very user-oriented things more than core, performance and
so on), I currently didn't perceive any benefit of e4 and I never
have the opportunity to take advantage of its features. My only
attempt so far (adding a context-menu to the main toolbar) of adding
some extensibility and tweaking some renderer is currently still a
failure.
I do not question whether e4 was necessary or not, I'd just like to
share that in my opinion, e4 still fails at provided huge value for
developing the Eclipse IDE, has definitely cost a lot of resources
that end-users would rather have seen placed elsewhere, and that
it's not what has caused the recent boost in the contributions to
Platform UI.
As for the reason for the drop off I'd point to the decision of
Apple to go with Android Studio as being the turning point,
followed by the current unrelenting marketing campaign from
JetBrains...
s/Apple/Google, but yeah, overall I agree.
But about JetBrains, it's not about Marketing, it's really about a
very good strategy in their product that has allowed them to deliver
a good functional quality. They've basically implemented years ago
what we're still discussing here (solid factorization of common
parts - editors, commands, views...), so they can simply create nice
features for new technos faster than we can do now. We're just
paying the price of the Tragedy of Commons, and luckily, there are
now enough motivated contributors to succeed on this challenge!
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