I do not know what possesed me to download and install Eclipse but I did. It was probably curiosity since I have always had a soft spot for development. Since Eclipse was recently featured in Dr. Dobbs it was probably inevitable that I check it out.
The download(85MB) was taking forever so I let it run overnight. When I unzipped the file I found out that there wasn’t anything to install. Oh, yea! This is java! I started the program and after a minute I was up and running. Java is slow to load but has adequate performance when loaded. The IDE is very nice and I really like the idea of using one ide to support multiple programming environments. Almost everything was there. I wanted the C/C++ compiler and the subversion plug-ins so I had to setup a couple of remote sites to download the plug-ins. For kicks I created and ran the Hello world program. Despite all this effort I only wasted an hour or so. Pretty cool!