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.
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.