Eclipse was just an example. There is going to be a niche for massive projects.
That niche and Java deserve each other.
There's also going to be a niche for projects that live for a very, very long time and thus are touched by a massive number of programmers
There's some overlap, but more than anything, this niche is just the one that really needs a solid unit test suite and documentation. There are excellent unit test framework packages for Ruby, and high unit test coverage is very much a part of Ruby programming culture. The documentation quality for open source Ruby projects also seems very high overall.
Community style/idiom standardization in Ruby and Node is probably a function of having a constellation of very active, popular, and often interdependent open source projects in each. When you're writing Rails gems that depend on other Rails gems, everyone is reading everyone's code, so agreeing on some style guidelines as a community makes everyone's life much easier.
I think that if someone wrote a very popular open source project (analogous to Rails) in a Lisp dialect, we might see the same thing start to evolve. And I think we're already starting to see it happening with Clojure. There's a Clojure Style Guide that's gone up on Github very recently: https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide
That niche and Java deserve each other.
There's also going to be a niche for projects that live for a very, very long time and thus are touched by a massive number of programmers
There's some overlap, but more than anything, this niche is just the one that really needs a solid unit test suite and documentation. There are excellent unit test framework packages for Ruby, and high unit test coverage is very much a part of Ruby programming culture. The documentation quality for open source Ruby projects also seems very high overall.
Community style/idiom standardization in Ruby and Node is probably a function of having a constellation of very active, popular, and often interdependent open source projects in each. When you're writing Rails gems that depend on other Rails gems, everyone is reading everyone's code, so agreeing on some style guidelines as a community makes everyone's life much easier.
I think that if someone wrote a very popular open source project (analogous to Rails) in a Lisp dialect, we might see the same thing start to evolve. And I think we're already starting to see it happening with Clojure. There's a Clojure Style Guide that's gone up on Github very recently: https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide