Well, in the past I have used Eclipse, Netbeans, SunStudio (essentially netbeans), IntelliJIdea, Oracle JDeveloper and others: all of them are enormously bugged, perhaps Netbans/Sunstudio was the least bugged. All of them suffer from an ever grown dotdirs that sooner or later brake and you need to restart from scratch...

In Emacs I have had brackeage, and an emacs bankruptcy. But in all case I have recovered anything when I have time simply investigating, when happen if I'm in hurry a quick revert and anything works again.

Exactly. If all those IDEs in the IDE graveyard were so good, why are they dead, while your Emacs is still here?

Too tied to a platform or language, perhaps, and very specific processes related to these? No vision for extensibility or future maintenance?

Sometimes IDEs are very tied to specific target platforms: like IDEs from microcontroller and DSP vendors and such. E.g. if you're programming PICs, you use Microchip's IDE. It provides the image downloading to the target and breakpoint debugging.

Modern GUIs have no extensibility, they are designed from the widget library to the entire software as commercial product, FOSS included because the idea of "modern" GUIs is commercial at design stage.

Emacs, like LispM, Xerox ancient worsktation etc instead was born in a world where software is free, only hardware is commercial. So they are designed from start to be flexible, user-centric, non product-centric.

It's worth remembering an ancient joke of MIT AI lab: An engineer ask few secretaries if they know how to program; they respond no. It ask if they were sure; they respond "of course". As a matter fact they use Emacs and program the mode they need, only no one tell them that's programming, they simply learn how to bend a flexible environment to their needs. Another thing worth mentioned is the classic "In the beginning was the command line" paper, short and nice.

Unfortunately people born in commercial world that do not know IT history can't really imaging that world and it's power. They are incapable of think outside actual business model so they do not understand that other models and software exists...

> If all those IDEs in the IDE graveyard were so good, why are they dead, while your Emacs is still here?

Emacs on its own is nothing but a fancy extensible notepad. The things that make an IDE come and go in the emacs world, too.

Hem... We are people, so we are sometimes lovers, sometimes cookers, sometimes fighters, businessman, ... but we are still the very same body. So why our tools need to be divided and confined to a purpose if we are able to craft a single efficient and integrated one?