Fanciful Magic

Bloated IDEs

James Robertson made a great blog entry this morning about IDEs: IDE Fun.

The funny thing is that I can start and shutdown Dolphin Smalltalk 6 times while trying to startup Eclipse ONCE. Squeak is the same way (I think I might have gotten 7 out of Squeak though). Maybe everyone should try it as a fun experiment. I mean, I've never had Smalltalk image from any vendor that didn't come up in seconds on modern computers. At work, I have 768 megs of RAM and a Pentium 4, and Eclipse still goes off to lala land (hitting the disk drive for 5 minutes) several times in a day. I still think Eclipse is the best IDE for Java, but I wind up using Scite for all my non-Java needs (html, javascript, ruby, etc) simply because it comes up quickly and doesn't bog me down at all....=) It's a simple text editor that doesn't pretend to be anything more with highlighting and searching.

But, then again, if I had my choice....Oh, how I can't wait to be back in Smalltalk land....21 days till the love is back! But, for now, No sleep till Smalltalk...=)