Hacker News Reader

Comment by fgonzag | Hacker News Reader

Kotlin is officially supported by Android which is huge, and the fact that IntelliJ dog foods their own product into their most important product also gives a degree of security about its future.

Another huge advantage Kotlin has over Scala is tooling, which is basically all thanks to an IDE company creating the language. Tooling will never fall behind because they are in the business of selling tools.

View on HN

Yes because Google is known for its long term commitment to initiatives.

As far as JetBrains, I am big fan, I have a license for R# that I gladly pay for, but JetBrains is just one company whose core set of products are rapidly being encroached upon by free alternatives.

I see lots of shiny new free editors, but IDEs, especially with deep semantic models and refactorings, are a rare breed.

Outside of Java, jetbrains doesn't have much or anything to offer against vscode, hence the GP's comment.

Jetbrains is even lagging behind, look at vscode remote capabilities which is way ahead jetbrains remote features.

For scala, Jetbrain IDE is far better than VsCode + langage server protocol

For the time being...

Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio, QtCreator look quite nice to me.

Best of all, I can use Java in any Java IDE.

having used the first three extensively , i’d say intellij is miles beyond them.

Indeed it wins hands down making my laptop sound like an aeroplane getting ready for takeoff with its continuous indexing, while making generous use of the existing memory.

Needs additional configuration for what the others do out of the box, like Javadoc tooltips.

Requires ten finger shortcuts.

It is also the only Java IDE unable to do mixed language debugging, Java/C/C++.

> JetBrains is just one company whose core set of products are rapidly being encroached upon by free alternatives

This has been true for almost two decades now - Eclipse first shipped in 2001, and it competes directly against IntelliJ, which was JetBrains' main product at the time.

And yet, they're still around.

> Another huge advantage Kotlin has over Scala is tooling, which is basically all thanks to an IDE company creating the language. Tooling will never fall behind because they are in the business of selling tools.

Not sure I'd agree with this. Kotlin's ties to JetBrains means that you're basically hosed if you don't use IntelliJ. Scala's tooling works pretty much everywhere (LSP/Metals, ENSIME, IntelliJ, Eclipse/Scala-IDE).

> Scala's tooling works pretty much everywhere (LSP/Metals, ENSIME, IntelliJ, Eclipse/Scala-IDE).

Scala's tooling also pretty much sucks everywhere (interestingly the least sucking IDE for Scala is guess what ... Intellij!)

In my experience IntelliJ is a bad Scala IDE. While it has lots of cool advanced features, none of them make up for not being able to compile the basic language accurately: what good is an IDE where I can't 100% rely on getting a red underline for invalid code and no red underlines for valid code?

The parts where IntelliJ has always fallen down on Scala seem to be precisely the parts that are missing from Kotlin. I can't help feeling that the JetBrains team just "doesn't get" higher-kinded types at all. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of good stuff in Kotlin otherwise.

And naturally now they have a vested interest that Kotlin experience just feels better than Scala anyway.

It's improved in the last year or so. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I find that it's one of the better supported languages out there, second to of course Java/Kotlin/TypeScript/C#.

> Scala's tooling also pretty much sucks everywhere (interestingly the least sucking IDE for Scala is guess what ... Intellij!)

In your opinion.

Personally I almost get depressed when I have to switch from Emacs+Metals to Android Studio for Kotlin stuff.

ENSIME was abandoned several years ago because the maintainer felt bullied[1] and LSP/Metals has a ways to go.

[1] https://medium.com/@fommil/hide-your-real-name-in-open-sourc...

As long as nothing bad ever happens to JetBrains.

(You could say the same thing about Sun/Oracle...risks all around.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com