The state and future of Eclipse, as an IDE and a platform.

Doug Schaefer from the Eclipse CDT team just brought up a very interesting post:

• "Eclipse smells kind of dead"??

This tied in with a lot of things I was thinking recently about the state and future of Eclipse, as an IDE and as a platform. I hadn't ever brought it up before, so I took an opportunity and made a huge comment on Doug's blog about it (I actually had to split it in three posts due to size limitations). I do hope people read it, especially those influential in the Eclipse development sphere.

I wouldn't repost it here, you can read it at Doug's blog:
http://cdtdoug.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/eclipse-smells-kind-of-dead.html?showComment=1376758343854#c491889590913528059

TL;DR: In summary, I talk a bit about:

• How it seems like the technical quality of Eclipse (the platform, and the JDT IDE) has not only failed to evolve but even declined a bit, more or less since the inception of the 4.x series.
• It also has not evolved much in terms of framework support for IDEs of other languages based on Eclipse (apart from the promising, but not yet very mature, DLTK project).
• Other IDEs are catching up (IntelliJ IDEA, MonoDevelop, even Netbeans), and becoming strong competitors.