Wednesday, May 18, 2016

What I like about NetBeans

Developers live and die by their IDE, and so they have religious wars about them. But thrice-blessed* are those that use multiple IDE.

Here is what I like about IntelliJ
  • It knows the variables you are going to type and often guesses them right; it also has a type-ahead support for them and methods;
  • It runs Scala out of the box.
But here is what I like about NetBeans
  • The UI editor (formerly Matisse, now just editor). It is unsurpassed. For example, the reason I don't write desktop apps in Scala is the absence of such editor.
  • It has a team with a few special guys. The name of one of them start with Geer or Cheer, I am not sure, but he writes an excellent blog about NetBeans. 😁 (Knowledgeable people say it is a hint to this).
  • In debugging, it shows values of variables and even functions or code fragments.

Note: thrice-blessed is a hint to this quote from Shakeaspeare