That's like comparing a destroyer to the USS Nimitz and calling it a small boat.

If I told my then colleagues at Engineering school I would have a multitasking, UNIX-based, RISC machine with 64 megs of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage and a fast, full-time, connection to the internet in my back pocket I would be locked up in a loony bin. If I told them I would use it to listen to music, I would end up burned for witchcraft.

Even my humble netbook is a good couple hundred times more powerful than the my Apple II. I am quite sure it can accommodate NetBeans and Eclipse quite comfortably, apart from the screen real-estate limitations.

"I would end up burned for witchcraft." Nah, Kurzweil would have come to your rescue. ;)

My netbook (900MHz, 512 meg RAM) is blindingly fast for unix; but Eclipse was unusably slow.

very small rocks!

A fully loaded Eclipse (or one of IBM's mammoth IDEs, no idea they call them now) can take 1GB, but the bare-bones Java profile is almost snappy.

PyDev is amazing as well. Admittedly, the machine upon which I'm running it has 16 GB of RAM, though.

PyDev is truly impressive. For small tasks I prefer Spyder from http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/ though. It's truly light weight and easy to use for small tasks.

Indeed - I used my eeepc for some Eclipse Android development and it worked quite well.

Thanks for the info you guys, I didn't know this. At work I generally have 1-3 large workspaces open in the "Java Enterprise" version of Eclipse, hence my warped perspective, maybe...

Have you tried Yoxos Eclipse[1] flavor? You can build your own distribution from scratch and only include the packages you need. You can even save your choices and continue modifying them next time you login. I have a very pleasant experience using it and my builds are usually around 100-200 MB.

[1] http://ondemand.yoxos.com/geteclipse/start

Hey, that's pretty neat. Thanks for sharing!