Paul was my second line manager when I worked at IBM. Now he's Mr. Eclipse, which cool. It was even cooler that he still remembered me after all these years. We got to catch up a bit on people that we know and so forth. We started talking about Eclipse, and he introduced me to John Wiegand, which was also cool. I told him about my experiences with Eclipse in the field, and how I've given a number of impromptu demos of Eclipse at SeaJUG. I talked with the two of them about two issues: 1) how to explain Eclipse to hackers (emacs/vi hackers in particular). I related how it takes a little explaining to get my hacker friends to understand why Eclipse is so powerful and has the potential for so much more. 2) Integrating Jython as a scripting language / interactive shell for Eclipse. This would be really cool because you get get at all the Eclipse internals so you could write scripts that would perform series of actions. More on this in the next post. It was good to catch up with Paul again, and I appreciated the chance to talk about the Eclipse project goals in person. I've been concerned about the level of outside participation in the core Eclipse components, and the guys told me that they want to encourage it, but that its hard code for people to get into because its the internals of the compiler. They have been getting good contributions for SWT.