I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc.
Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums and found out that there was a major UI redesign with no automated testing and very little manual testing, and the reason was "unfortunately there's no budget for testing". This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess the lesson here is "don't redesign something if you can't test it works", which really shouldn't be a surprise to any software developer.
Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken as to be unusable -- yes, I'm talking about Scala IDE, the "official" Eclipse-based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually inserted gibberish; I don't mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.
Everyone blames the Eclipse foundation, but really they set the bar high. The only IDE to rise above it has been Intellij imo.
They missed the boat on JS. That was a big issue for me as a full stack dev. When it became clear they were going to drag their feet forever on updates to JSDT and not support the plethora of languages that suddenly seemed to come from nowhere, I had to bite the bullet and go to Intellij.
Eclipse is like a nice house in a neighborhood that needs some serious renovations. Intellij is move in ready with gleaming countertops, fresh floors, new appliances etc. Can you tell I'm house hunting?
Netbeans was also a lot better than Eclipse IMO (though worse than IntelliJ). For Java and friends, anyway; I’ve never really used any of them but IntelliJ for non-JVM stuff.
A version they released where SubEclipse's installer was broken on a fresh install. The work around was install the previous version, install SubEclipse, then upgrade.
And then the next release after, CDT Plugin wasn't compatible with the new version.
The first case it was obvious no one tested installing SubEclipse on a fresh install. The second drove home that any language other than Java was going to be a bastard step child as far as the dev's were concerned.
> The first case it was obvious no one tested installing SubEclipse on a fresh install.
That sort of thing is embarrassing. You just know some junior dev thought "well, it worked on my computer!". I don't mind when an experimental new feature doesn't work, or when some obscure corner case is broken; shit happens. But when the main, "happy" path for a major plugin doesn't work, the project is in serious trouble and you know it's time to consider jumping ship.
Maybe I'm really misremembering or didn't pay attention to this UI redesign. I was a somewhat regular eclipse user 10+ years ago, wrote a plugin as part of my thesis (in late 2009) and used newer versions in the last 5-6 years, it never felt really different?
On the other hand I've never been a big fan either. Developing plugins wasn't fun - getting various plugins to work together wasn't fun either. It was an OK IDE for Java and some other languages...
To me Eclipse used to be the gold standard for Java (it wouldn't even have occurred to me to use it for other languages, which usually had their own IDEs anyway. This was before Scala).
I didn't remember the exact version that jumped the shark, but TFA mentions Eclipse 4, so I googled and it must have been Juno (about 2012, then). It truly was night and day: the previous version of Eclipse was fast and responsive, and everything more or less worked, and then we got Juno which was completely unresponsive, took ages to do anything, it randomly froze or slowed down, and all sorts of widgets constantly failed to render or displayed error messages. Simply killing Eclipse because marketplace or some index update took too long became the norm. I remember thinking "but this is a SOLVED problem! All of this used to work! How can this be happening?", then reading the forums and finding out about the complete UI redesign and that they didn't have the budget to test it thoroughly. I'm not talking as a plugin writer but as an end user. It truly was a horror story.
The Scala IDE thing is more understandable because it was something new and Scala is a complex language. Still, it was embarrassing that this was the official IDE and it was so bad. IntelliJ was initially also very bad at Scala -- I remember it constantly gave compilation errors for perfectly good code -- but then it got improved to the point of usability, while Scala IDE remained slow and unusable. At that point I switched.
Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!". Then I read the Eclipse forums and found out that there was a major UI redesign with no automated testing and very little manual testing, and the reason was "unfortunately there's no budget for testing". This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess the lesson here is "don't redesign something if you can't test it works", which really shouldn't be a surprise to any software developer.
Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken as to be unusable -- yes, I'm talking about Scala IDE, the "official" Eclipse-based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually inserted gibberish; I don't mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.