The Lazy Dev

When around 2002 I switched from Netbeans to Eclipse I was attending
university, coding just for passion. It was a great step: Eclipse knew
what I were doing while Netbeans was just a big GUI with coloured
syntax and integrated compilation. It's ability to understand code did
not go beyond a for cycle. He was like a guy that call itself a
programmer just because he can write a for loop.
Eclipse was smart, he can do code refactoring, that means that he had
a more high level understanding of what was going on.

In the first years, Eclipse grew with me and development was a two
people game: I coded *with* Eclipse.
In recent two or three years I continue growing but Eclipse was stuck.
Now he just does not understand me anymore, like a girlfriend that
still talks about things we talked five years ago, that still has same
vision of the world. Our relationship is going to end.

Nowadays understanding code is not enough. Projects are big, made of
many modules, with sophisticated dependency hierarchy and
configuration. If the IDE can't understand what is going on, you do
not have enough support, you are left alone and you loose time
understanding issues that involves projects configuration, relying on
test, without any refactoring abilities in the field.

Eclipse just does not understand this "multi module projects" thing,
is not integrated with maven and the builds result are non
deterministic. I want to tell the ide "this module is not here
anymore, from now on belongs to this other project". This statement
means a lot of changes in project config and in subversion and so on.
This is a predictable change, there should be a refafctoring for this.

I'd like that my IDE moves in this direction, helping me in managing
modules, deploys and different kind of configuration and runtime
environments.

I hope that IntelliJ IDEA, which I am trying now, will answer to at
least some of my needs.