> tooling isn't great (this true of anything jvm to some degree though)
Well, you have plenty of very decent tools to inspect a running JVM state, and that's priceless. Eclipse is alright if you manage to set it up once with the tools you need and don't fiddle with the setup afterwards. Although slow, it packs a lot more features out of the box than Visual Studio. The debugger is pretty good too (including remote debugging).
If you compare it to state-of-the-art tooling for more fringe languages like Python or Haskell, it's lightyears better, really.
Well, you have plenty of very decent tools to inspect a running JVM state, and that's priceless. Eclipse is alright if you manage to set it up once with the tools you need and don't fiddle with the setup afterwards. Although slow, it packs a lot more features out of the box than Visual Studio. The debugger is pretty good too (including remote debugging).
If you compare it to state-of-the-art tooling for more fringe languages like Python or Haskell, it's lightyears better, really.