Havoc Pennington on IDEs, after giving Eclipse a whirl:

The most important language features are the ones that enable a great IDE.

I do all my Java hacking in Eclipse (and have no doubt that I could be similarly productive in Netbeans or IntelliJ IDEA if I used them every day), and I do my other coding in VIM. When people compare the overall level of productivity in Java to certain scripting languages, I think they often fail to take into account the IDE factor. Between the fact that the IDE simply does a lot of typing for me, and builds a symantic model of the code that enables me to transform it in many ways with little effort, the greater overhead imposed by Java’s syntax melts away.

Update: the subject of the post above is not Java, per se, but language politics regarding the GNOME desktop for Linux. Miguel de Icaza has a post about that as well. I don’t even use GNOME or follow Linux politics these days, so I have no idea what they’re talking about.