Now it’s Eclipse that has "baroque" code

This provoked a wry smile, from a Reg Dev article on the forthcoming Eclipse 4:

Underpinning all this, though, is an attempt to escape the “baroque” 3.x codebase for something that’s simple, clean and modular. That means eliminating repetition in code and interdependencies found in the monolithic 3.x.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s difficult to reach in and fix a bug without impacting lots of other things,” one e4 committer told EclipseCon.

Now, Eclipse is a child of the refactoring era. It is built using an MVC (Model-View-Controller), component-based, plug-in architecture. Design patterns guru Erich Gamma worked on Eclipse and on its Java Development Tools.

If Eclipse is now a ball of spaghetti, what went wrong? Though its possible the problems are being over-stated in an effort to justify version 4.

Technorati tags: eclipse, erich gamma, mvc, java, refactoring

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