Why such low ratings?
I guess it could be that only two or three of us are actually rating the plugin, but it seem that in any case its dropped quite a bit in the last month. But I don't know why that would be. The plugin is doing quite well and continues improve quite steadily.
It would be interesting to hear from the low raters their rationale....
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maybe because they are comparing it to the state of the java-editor? they got used to hotkey refactoring magic and pre-compile-error-markings
Maybe it's because people are thinking of it as a finished product, even though its version number is 0.3.x. As a project at version 0.3.x, it's fine. As a finished project, it's a piece of crap. It's riddled with bugs and it stands out terribly in its host program (IDEA) due to its lack of support for many fine features of that program. For a person who's just coming to Scala out of the blue, it's easy to judge the plugin as a finished project, because Scala has been around for years and is itself presented very professionally on the main Scala site, and because JetBrains is generally awesome. I am such a person, and I didn't see any evidence that this plugin was unfinished until I ran it and directly encountered several of its problems. Well, technically my eyes probably registered the plugin's low version number before then, but that information didn't make it into my brain I guess, and everything else I knew suggested that the plugin would be basically pretty nice. Which it wasn't--not for a version 1.0 project, anyway. So I was inclined to give it a low rating--but then I read the forums, and saw that the developers had had nice-sounding plans for it as of just a couple of months ago (which probably means they still have such plans), and I looked at the version number, finally. If I'd been a little less careful, then this plugin would have gotten one more two-star rating from me.
A similar thing happened when I tried the Scala plugin for Eclipse--except that plugin actually uses the same version number as the Scala libraries, which at that time was 2.7 or some such. And the blurb on the Scala site about the Eclipse plugin made it sound like the plugin was finished and good. (There's a similar blurb about the IDEA plugin, but that one doesn't make any crazy promises about "seamless integration" the way the Eclipse plugin's blurb does.) So in that case, the text that one encounters on the way to trying the plugin is actively deceptive. In the case of the IDEA plugin, it's just... kinda misleading. But not really a lie.
For me biggest criteria are:
When those are stable then I would like to see Scala move to the full Java feature set. I check out 95% of the releases, I only rate those that I use for at least a day.
/jwh