(2007-01-10) Mcgrath Eclipse

Sean McGrath [has](http://www.itworld.com/App Dev/nlsebiz070109/index.html) been assimilated into the Eclipse IDE world. Fifth, as the center of gravity in the developer tools industry shifts to the uber-tools, it will become more and more difficult to stay outside of one of the big uber-tools. Pretty soon, complete projects set up for ubertool X,Y or Z will have the network effect of getting all developers on those projects to use the same uber-tool. Think of the "office wars" on a smaller scale and to a very different audience you have the general flavor of it. One final and largely uninteresting side-effect is that I have - partly as a consequence of the reasoning presented in this article - begun using an uber-tool (Eclipse as it happens). After years of avowing that I would never succumb to using one of those newfangled all-singing and all-dancing IDEs, here I am, dragging and dropping my way through a software development project. My resistance was ultimately futile. Will I be happier? More productive? I don't know. Will I be less out of touch with 21st century software development realities? Yes.