Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.

Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.

And so pray tell, what benefits has the industry produced by herding around JS and python in the last two decades? Java was a decent language and getting better and its tooling was stellar, beyond anything those two ecosystems can muster today.

It was 20 wasted years of running in circles. Lots of motion, little progress.

Vite and Bun are about a billion years ahead of their analog in the Java ecosystem in the early 2000s. I do agree that the editor story for Java was very good, though -- way ahead of its time.

I don't know what greatness it brings to the table. I'm sure it's fabulous.

Nonetheless, in the Java of yesteryear we packaged shit into .war files and deployed to app servers. Took all of 30s. Projects (Java backend + JSP frontend) ran just fine right in the ide, no bundling, transpiling, pruning, minifying, or whatever myriad of incantation a js project needs to do to get itself live. it was all live the moment you hit Ctrl-S in the IDE. The class file was created and Tomcat was already running the new code if you set it up integrated to the IDE.

There was zero mental or temporal overhead from source changes to observing results.