Eclipse Sucks.

[TimTheGreat]

Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK

OK but seriously, I've used vim exactly once for a period of a month, and that was entirely because of necessity.

I once used vim for a month. But that's because I couldn't exit.

[tcjinaz]

Originally Posted by virtuald

This is precisely why you should teach a high school student to use basic VIM -- hitting 'i' and ':wq' isn't that hard.

I thought it was <esc>:wq
or is that plain old VI? Plain old VI is an important skill, because sometimes one does not have a GUIish (well, better than VT-100) connection to that machine you're talking to.

I'm an Emacs guy at work, somewhat because of its genealogy back to TECO,

I'm liking the comments about getting the kids on the command line. I'm tired of newbe MSEE's showing up to their first real job with absolutely no clue what can happen through the Unix/Linux (pick your shell, no religious arguments please) command line, which is the core of how we design semiconductors.

Tim

[mathking]

I have been teaching computer science to high school kids for quite a while now. It was a different century when I started. Kids who are programming a robot should be able to handle a wide variety of methods to create and compile code. From a simple text editor and the command line to using a variety of IDEs. That said, when I teach students new to programming we use an IDE. In fact we use Eclipse because I have found it has the best balance of fairly easy learning curve, good tools and ease of installation for them at home. The reason we use an IDE is that when they are first learning to program, I want them focused on developing and implementing algorithms. Not distracted by the intricacies of getting code compiled.

When I first started teaching, a lot of the "old timers" argued that we should always teach Assembly first, and command line compiling, so students understand "how it really works." They somehow always used a race car analogy: "You wouldn't want a race car drive who didn't understand how the engine works." There are two main problems with this, in my opinion. The first is that they are arguing that Java (or when I first started Pascal, Fortran or C) is an abstraction so students should learn Assembly first. The same basic argument was used for using command line compiling over an IDE. The problem is that Assembly is still an abstraction. It is closer to the machine than Java or C, but still an abstraction. So teaching it as "what is really going on" is not in fact correct. And leads to misconceptions.

The second is that it leads to bad initial habits. In my experience it is much easier to learn a higher level language like Java or C first and then learn Assembly. In particular it is good to use an environment like Eclipse or NetBeans that makes automatic formatting easy. I had a boss once who had a poster for Dante's "Inferno." He had modified so that the seventh circle was reserved for those who do not consistently format code and the eighth for people who confuse a short line of code as an elegant or efficient line.

[Coach#3536]

3536 uses eclipse and loves it. We have one of the best adaptive systems because of it. Student have worked hard up front on the subroutines and dashboards so that we can make correction and adjustments in seconds. We have earned 2 control awards over the last two years and have had little trouble with it (I would say none but dont want to call up a jinx).

Discipline is critical with any program. Understanding and research is a long process and necessary in any code. If you dont have the time to put in the effort its understandable that your team doesnt like it.

Change what you use. But dont follow the old saying "A poor craftsman blames the tool not their own flaws"

[wesleyac]

I think that people have given a good overview of the advantages and disadvantages of eclipse. If you do decide to use something else, be sure to check out our build system. We use bazel (http://bazel.io/), and most of our students use vim. We've published our base robot code from last year at https://github.com/frc1678/base-robot-2016, but we'll probably update it this summer. A lot of this is based off of 971's system, but ours is probably easier to copy paste

If you have any questions about it, feel free to PM me.

[alexboz]

I too dislike eclipse, this year I managed to get IntelliJ IDEA to work with the robot code and I like it much better.

[ThreeFifths]

Title: Eclipse Sucks.

Look, I realize you don't like it, but why would you start with the thread off with "Eclipse Sucks.", with a period too. It sounds really aggressive, and like you are about to devolve into a rant. But, weirdly enough, the title is much more rage-y then the post itself, which tries to stay calm? Make up your mind, are you really crazily mad and think everyone else should hate eclipse too or trying to find like minded people who also have alternatives.

Originally Posted by mathking

When I first started teaching, a lot of the "old timers" argued that we should always teach Assembly first, and command line compiling, so students understand "how it really works." They somehow always used a race car analogy: "You wouldn't want a race car drive who didn't understand how the engine works." There are two main problems with this, in my opinion. The first is that they are arguing that Java (or when I first started Pascal, Fortran or C) is an abstraction so students should learn Assembly first.

Totally agree with you. Back in my day, we didn't deal with abstractions. If a programmer wanted to contribute to the code, they would have to join as a freshman, spend three years progressing through the ranks of wiring up GAL programmers, learning how to bit-bang memory instructions, studying advanced electron theory, memorizing the architecture and pin diagrams of all the components of the cRIO, and writing a custom *nix kernel. Finally, once they had completed all these tasks, they would be allowed to spend their final junior summer reverse-engineering the Netbeans program and FRC deployment tools. Unfortunately, it was all in vain because FIRST decided to switch to the roboRIO and deprecate the Netbeans plugins, and because our programming team had no idea how to abstract, we lost years of experience and none of the second, third, or fourth-year programmers understand how the robot works. We were all out of luck until, of all people, a freshman came into the programming department and told us about wpilib.screenstepslive.com. After a few minutes of him explaining to us why we could not just curl the website, but would have to use an internet browser (who knew people hosted images on their server to be displayed right next to text!), we finally realized our mistake. We didn't need to know the architecture! Or the pin diagrams! We can simply let someone write different code, on different platforms, across all devices, but the code all operates the same way! That way, no matter what device we are on, every memory address is accessed an approximately similar command. If only people had realized this decades before us!

[Fauge7]

I can see how you might think eclipse sucks and that it's bad. But an ide for programming the robot in general is way better then using a command line based editor. If you spend the time to learn some of the shortcuts you will actually start to like it or other ide. I have heard intelij is better so give others a try and see but don't be complaining about something because somebody at discount didn't teach you why typing out all the code is important.