Eclipse is a direct descendant of IBM Visual Age for Java, which branched from VA for Smalltalk.
VA was an excellent tool for Smalltalk insofar as it allowed you to work with a big soup of classes, abstracting away source files to the point of near invisibility.
Fitting Java required a bit of shoehorning, and I must admit VAJava was an acquired taste for me. I had to sink or swim as VAJ was the official tool of my job work environment.
Having grokked VAJ, Eclipse was a godsend for me. It was similar enough that I had little learning curve, coming from VAJ; and it was a complete, professional IDE for $0. At the time Eclipse was gifted to the Java community, the alternatives were either costly or minimalistic and crude.
Eclipse continued to get noticeably better from release 1.0 to the early 3's, and I was honestly excited about each major upgrade. I would say that yes, this was Eclipse's Golden Age.
IIRC, One of the Gang of Four was the project manager of what became Eclipse afterwards. That and the rest of the environment brought a fair share of bad design choices. Have you ever tried cooying an Eclipse workspace in a different directory, you would recognize the pain.
I think there was a golden period for embedded systems and other non-Java developers that started about 10 years ago but maybe it's over, not sure since I'm not working in that space right now.
A lot of vendors wrote Eclipse plugins instead of doing their own IDE and everybody won. You could integrate auto-complete, compiler errors, source control and debugging all in one IDE with a little hand-tuning. You can get this to work across multiple toolchains, not just gcc. Sure, Eclipse is a hog but it still seemed better than having three ugly and buggier vendor IDEs on your machine.
I started using eclipse... already 15 years ago ? I never liked it, but at those times there weren’t much alternative beside vim dreamweaver... as ColdFusion :) moved to Java it looked promising but the horrible UI, the random errors, and its slowness were so frustrating.
I used Eclipse for 5 years starting with 3.0 and hated it from day one. I started programming in Java shortly after it first became available and loved it. Eclipse managed to suck all the fun out of using it.
Really? I cut my OOP teeth in Java and IBM's WebSphere Application Developer tool, which was vanilla Eclipse with a bunch of WebSphere plugins that extended functionality here and there over the open source version. Eclipse always just clicked with me. It was not hard to learn (though to be fair I had company-paid training on J2EE dev using the tool) and I still use it today.
Maybe I am too stuck in the Eclipse mindset. I find the IntelliJ offering to be very hard to use with a proficiency anywhere near what I have with Eclipse.
I don't know if I will ever join the IDEA crowd. NetBeans can go jump off a cliff.
Eclipse seems to be a magical combination of hard to use, slow, and hated.
Was there a golden period? Was it great for awhile, and now is past it's prime, like MS Word?