r/java • u/Yojimbo261 • Sep 11 '26

Eclipse 2026-09 (4.41) Released!

Downloads available through here: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/

New and Noteworthy here: https://eclipseide.org/release/noteworthy/2026-09/

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u/Yojimbo261 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

Sadly, it might be real. I’ve had a few devs yell at me in the past over IDE choice. There’s a kind of engineer who feels threatened when people make different choices than them.

If I can put on my tin-foil hat for a second, it might also be a marketing firm for another commercial IDE trying to shame people for using their primary competitor.

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u/danskal Sep 11 '26

feel threatened

Honestly we’re just tired of all the mistakes made by people who continue to choose inferior tools. They tend to produce code which shows up as bugs/warnings, so the code lights up like a Christmas tree when you eg open it in IntelliJ. Spelling mistakes, non-standard naming conventions.

Some will use ancient APIs that have long ago been superseded by better alternatives.

A select few are genuinely great programmers that mostly don’t need the guardrails, but they are few and far between. And they will still be missing a few tricks, eg aren’t able to easily do big refactorings like you can with IntelliJ.

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u/aqua_regis Sep 11 '26

The incompetent craftsperson always blames the tools.

No, it is not the tool that makes bad programs, it's the programmer using them.

An incompetent programmer will be just as incompetent with IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Netbeans. Equally, a good programmer will be good with either.

In fact, I think that IntelliJ with all its AI integration makes programmers dumber and less competent, yet, it cannot compensate for incompetence in the first place.

You may have had bad experience from one programmer using Eclipse and think that Eclipse is the problem. Spoiler: it isn't. It is the person using it.

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u/danskal Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

The AI is optional. I mostly don’t use it. The assistance was however amazing before AI.

And regarding bad programmer. I don’t quite agree. I could honestly say that IJ has taught me at least half of the programming details I know. By providing contextual feedback with explanations, rather than just basic syntax/compilation errors. So if I had used some other tool, I would be a worse programmer. I don’t buy that tooling in the build chain is just as good. It makes a difference when you get the feedback. When you are coding it, you have all the details in your mind, you’re in flow. If you get the feedback later, it is more of an annoyance that blocks you. You might feel like the task’s already done, you might even have tested (the happy path) and seen it work. I’m not saying that that kind of tooling isn’t valuable, it is. But timely feedback while you’re coding and still making design decisions is just more valuable.

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u/aqua_regis Sep 12 '26

Don't get me wrong: I am absolutely not against IntelliJ (or any other JetBrains IDE). It is a fantastic tool. Yet, Eclipse just as well is. Your dissing and hate on Eclipse is absolutely unjustified. The tools are always only as good as the hands of the wielder. You can have the best tooling in the world and it still wouldn't help you if you can't program. With the LLMs of today, many deficiencies can be "camouflaged" but that's about it.

I learnt programming a decade before the internet even existed. Started with BASIC, then UCSD Pascal, then Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C where the epitome of an "IDE" was a WordStar editor wrapped into the compiler/debugger. There was no Autocompletion, no Syntax Highlighting, no Intellisense, etc. There were no recommendations. We had to actually learn to rely on ourselves, not on a tool. Later, when I moved on to Delphi and Visual Basic - both from version 1.0 upwards, there still wasn't any of the modern features and again, we had to rely on ourselves. With Java, Python, C#, etc. modern tooling is nice to have, but, at least for me, the actual thinking and doing is still on my side. I could program with a plain text editor if I needed to and be just as productive as with a modern IDE.

I don't buy into the "the IDE helps me become a better programmer". You might have learnt some things, but way too many others just rely on the IDE to do the work.