Re: Scripting the Eclipse IDE (was: RDi vs SEU)

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 5:21 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am still a little surprised that Eclipse has been lacking in this
area for so long.

The Eclipse developers are mostly volunteers, working on the parts they
personally find interesting. Apparently, few Java programmers at that
skill level have an interest in scripting Eclipse itself.

Apparently. But you can find other volunteer-developed editors and
IDEs that either come with scripting facilities or have
community-contributed plug-ins that provide such facilities. I do
suspect the complexity of Eclipse itself has a lot to do with it. I'm
imagining that the hard work of building Monkey in the first place
should have been the biggest hump, and that any maintenance after that
(to keep up with any compatibility-breaking changes in Eclipse) should
have been... not trivial, but not so hard that folks gave up on it.
Yet folks *did* give up on it. So did Eclipse really change that
much, that suddenly? Maybe it did, or maybe it's just a beast to work
with.

I have the Eclipse Monkey source, but it's pretty opaque to these eyes.

Surely opaque to most people's. If its developer(s) and potential
user-contributors eventually found it too difficult to maintain, that
can't bode well for other folks trying to figure it out.

Maybe someday I'll take a couple weeks off of work and sit down
and really work on it.

As I think I mentioned, the current EASE project seems to be built at
least in part on the work done for Monkey. Given how long ago
development stopped on Monkey, maybe it would be easier to use EASE as
a starting point rather than Monkey? (Also, one of the stated goals
of EASE, not sure how well they delivered on it, was to be easier to
use than Monkey.)

John Y.