[Derbasti]

I agree that an IDE does not separate from the need to know how stuff works. But I certainly know a few programmers who do not dare to think beyond what their IDE allows them to do. They use built-in wizards and refactorings, but they do not seek solutions that are not easily expressible with those.

Hence, their code is factored just the way the IDE would, even if there are better alternatives available. This is the kind of mediocrity I am talking about. (And by the way, you could go much worse than Eclipse at that)

I actually had quite a few discussions where the main misunderstanding was that we used different tools and thus thought of different things as "easy" or "natural". In one case, one developer argued that it would be a good idea to create a whole bunch of classes to encapsulate a problem space. However, creating all these classes really would not have been necessary at all, he could have accomplished the same goal with a much simpler list of functions. Thus, we ended up with a HUGE file containing some several dozen classes that no-one but him could navigate, because it was factored just right for his programming editor but was all but unusable for anyone else.

One developer even told me that he did not know how to write a correct if statement in C because his editor had a template for that. What my argument boils down to is that this kind of behavior is bad, and I have seen it becoming a sad kind of sub-culture in Eclipse/Java land.

That said, I completely agree that if used correctly, there is nothing inherently wrong with Eclipse or Java per se.

[Evbn]

Refactoring can't create functionality. What you are saying is not compatible with the theory if entropy. Eclipse is a high level language running on the JVM, and not a bad one.