> Given that IDEs are the primary tools of programmers, and unlike Photoshop users our primary skill is to build software itself, why are IDEs not the most advanced pieces of software that exist?
I guess it depends what you call advanced. There's some pretty impressive work that goes into the static and dynamic analysis, refactoring, profiling etc. tools that you see in modern IDEs. Is that more or less advanced than software that can identify faces in an image? Who's to say?
BTW I think you're being a bit unfair to Eclipse. I agree about its performance, but picking on the download size seems a bit disingenuous: looking at the download page right now the largest package is less than 250 Mb, no more than a few minutes even on a slow broadband connection. Both svn and cvs are well supported within the IDE too. I've just decided to switch away from Eclipse primarily because of its performance, but it deserves justified criticism at least. :-)
By comparison, take a look at Blender3D. It's a 22MB download, though you need a Python interpreter, which is also not all that large.
Eclipse is impressively bloated, but that's about the most positive thing I can say about it nowadays, especially after being stuck using it at amazon and disney. (Both of which had some of the poorest quality legacy code I've ever seen.)
I guess it depends what you call advanced. There's some pretty impressive work that goes into the static and dynamic analysis, refactoring, profiling etc. tools that you see in modern IDEs. Is that more or less advanced than software that can identify faces in an image? Who's to say?
BTW I think you're being a bit unfair to Eclipse. I agree about its performance, but picking on the download size seems a bit disingenuous: looking at the download page right now the largest package is less than 250 Mb, no more than a few minutes even on a slow broadband connection. Both svn and cvs are well supported within the IDE too. I've just decided to switch away from Eclipse primarily because of its performance, but it deserves justified criticism at least. :-)