And he turned off comments on his blog basically forcing me to put the comment here. The CDT committers know I refer to Bjorn and his use of Jedi mind tricks. And I’m falling into it again, making my thoughts visible on my own blog instead of hiding it in his comments page. You’re Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me, well, actually they do…

There are a lot of good things happening at Eclipse, and that you can’t argue with. This week’s demo of e4 self-hosting is definitely something very cool. Using the CDT in my hobby time this week doing something intense has helped me realize what a good thing we have and the great work that the contributors have put together. So as much nay saying and navel gazing we’ve done in recent weeks, things aren’t all that bad.

But for those of us who have been around a while, the excitement at Eclipse is certainly well below the levels of those early days. I’ll never forget those early EclipseCons and looking around at all the vendor positioning going on, trying to grab a piece of the spotlight. It was pretty wacky, and really fun for this lowly developer from Saskatchewan to be a part of.

But Eclipse has grown up. As Bjorn says, it is what it is. It ain’t all that bad. Is it as good as we’d individually like it to be? No, it’s not. That’s the frustration you see. Especially as us old timers start to deal with that reality. But I’m proud to be associate with Eclipse and it has rewarded me well. And I think that’s true for many.

So we keep plugging away. People will come and go, Bjorn included, and Eclipse lives on because it still meets that need that sparked the excitement in the early days. And we should all be proud of that.