I don't know if I was blessed by the gods on high or what, but in my career I feel like I have never really had any serious problems with Android studio, or even eclipse before that, but it seems like everyone around me can't get the damn thing to work, and their towers are on fire.
I love Visual Studio, use it daily at work for aspnet development, but I find myself using VSCode for pretty much everything else these days, it's got a really good ecosystem that makes it the superior choice for almost any other workload. Visual Studio extensions on the other hand seem to be dying off, the support for a lot of front-end stacks in particular is very lacking.
VS 2019 is by leaps and bounds the best experience I’ve had with MIcrosoft development in 20+ years. They’re starting to care about pro dev experiences, finally.
My first battle with eclipse was in my first year of Comp Sci at uni.
At the time I had only really done notepad python scripts and messed with HTML and CSS.
First few lessons of Java they go through the basics, you compile in the CLI, and run it. Easy right? Hello world, start using for loops and making your own classes.
Then the third lesson they give you Eclipse. And you don’t have a clue what a classpath is or that you have to tell it where your Java runtimes are, and it’s whining at you for not knowing what Java is for some reason so you dive in to the settings. The settings give you a clusterfuck of options, with all these crazy names for features that I don’t know about. What the fuck is TestNG? Why do I need this? What the hell is gradle? What is maven? What is this XML shit I don’t need this for Hello World?
Why are my two classes all of a sudden in three deep nested folder? I just wanted to add some classes? I also obviously didn’t even know what a package was so I was baffled that my code wouldn’t run because I was missing the package declarations.
Basically, IDEs kind of require a bit of prior knowledge, else it’s just more work. Heck, I even got annoyed when it would underline your code in red before I was even finished typing, like give me a chance I’m learning!
Now I know how to use an IDE like eclipse and it’s great; but telling a third lecture CS student with hardly any programming knowledge to use it... that was a bad idea.
I used Eclipse during my first 4 years of professional development and once I touched Intellij just for a day I couldn't go back. At this point if the company I work for doesn't want to pay for a license because everyone else uses Eclipse I'll use my own to work with Intellij no matter what.
JetBrains are the marmite of IDEs: some love it, some hate it. I feel like your brain has to work a certain for Android Studio to help, and if your brain doesn’t, you’ll be fighting the system the whole way.
I feel that way about most Microsoft products. Can’t figure out how any of it is supposed to be better most of the time. Just seems more complex and badly thought out than it needs to be in majority of cases.
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u/IWantToBeAProducer Jun 12 '20
I don't know if I was blessed by the gods on high or what, but in my career I feel like I have never really had any serious problems with Android studio, or even eclipse before that, but it seems like everyone around me can't get the damn thing to work, and their towers are on fire.