Apparently they refuse to support the most popular web IDE because Kotlin for JS is really about selling IDEA licenses. Fair enough, but it means I don't suggest Kotlin for anything except as a Java alternative and Android.
There's better options from companies that are less adversarial to their community.
> This would not only be beneficial to developers using this editor, but could drag a lot of developers to IDEA when seeking out for a full-blown IDE eventually.
In this context, the JetBrains employee was not saying "it won't sell licenses and therefore we won't do it", they were saying "this won't do what you think it will do".
JetBrains is a company, and like any other company their focus will tend to lean toward where the money is. But my experience with Kotlin over the last several years is that JetBrains is very responsive to the community and their needs.
> The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA
https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
C# was created to be the systems language of .NET, although the CLR supports other languages from day one.
I don't understand what Borland's history has to do with JetBrains' decision to invest their resources on adding support for a programming language to a third-party text editor.
Sounds like a non-sequitur of an unwarranted cheap shot that adds nothing to the discussion besides noise.
Its effectivly the same thing, even though Microsofts goal wasn't selling visual studio, because they've got a much more lucrative cash cow: an operating system
.NET was going to use Java, when it was still codenamed as Ext-VOS.
It was the lawsuit against J++ that made C# a reality.
The motivation behind c# was keeping people in the Microsoft ecosystem. Wherever they attempted to use a rebranded jvm before that is entirely besides the point
A line that might become amusing when you read the whole account:
> Thus began a long line of sporadic interjections by Bill [Joy| where he was right. He usually is.
[1]: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html
It also looks like you're forgetting that Java has been for years (decades) owned by Oracle, which is renowned for taking very public legal fights to milk Java to the extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Java has been owned by Sun, and then Oracle, and it was more closed source during Sun's stewardship than Oracle's.
The first lawsuit was done by Sun against Microsoft, and they only missed the one against Google, because they were out of money by them.
Unfortunately Google got away with screwing up Sun, not happy with that, they keep using they flavoured Android Java when selling Kotlin's push into the ecosystem.
Still in all these years, Java was never used to sell Netbeans commercial licenses, regardless of how you to try to change the music.
But that's completely irrelevant, isn't it? Cherry-picking aside, don't you understand how loss leaders work, and how companies use that strategy to push the sale of their cash cows?
IMO this Microsoft stupidity to not open source .Net and FUD the open source alternatives costed them and the entire dev community a lot, we would have a good alternative for cross platform high level languages with a big framework (as alternative to JS+node+electron+npm+framewoks)
I personally was a big fan of C# and I can't forgive MS stupidity , because of the Windows Team a good language and platform was sabotaged, as I said it could have been a worthy competitor to JS/node especially in the past when JS was shit and even now where npm is filled with leftPads and colorRed packages.
I don't think we've heard the last word yet.
Btw, i did not implied anything about node or npm quality, someone that worked with both seriously in recent years might add their thoughts (so I am not a node fan just a C# lower disappointed on MS behavior).
What if I want to continue using Emacs?
There's literally no reason for not having full IDE experience in Emacs.
It seems pretty reasonable to me for them to not pay employee salaries to build a plugin for a competing product, especially when they already provide a comprehensive IDE solution available for free (in both senses). What other companies are doing that? I don't mean that as a challenge. I'd love to know what the better options are.
What you said would make sense, except they do build a plugin for Eclipse.
Better options would be any language where the stewards are not trying to extract money from you by forcing your IDE choice. Or where they view fostering community good will as being in their best interest. Ex. MS offers an official LS rather than saying "we don't support other IDEs because Visual Studio licenses."
There's lots of choices here for compile to JS languages: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...
I don't know a single person who used Eclipse after 2020. Don't you think that supporting Eclipse might be a viable marketing strategy to get people who are stuck in the past on board with newer tech, as if anything, they will probably move on to IDEA?
> Ex. MS offers an official LS rather than saying "we don't support other IDEs because Visual Studio licenses."
MS is a bad example because they recently literally took away a feature from dotnet to push it into VS and drive sales, which was met a HUGE backlash from the community. Dotnet IS the driving force behind Visual Studio. JetBrains actually came in and took a piece of that from them(thankfully, because I personally hate vs/vscode). Like other answer to your comment said, JetBrains doesn't owe anything to anyone. If there is already a Language Server for Kotlin, great, I don't see how a product-based company could benefit from making something that drives people away from their (already free) product...
So your circle of acquaintances doesn't include anyone who used an IDE in the past year, and you extrapolate your personal anecdote how far?
> Don't you think that supporting Eclipse might be a viable marketing strategy to get people who are stuck in the past (...)
Can we spend a minute discussing how idiotic is this fad-drive development belief? I mean, why is anyone expected to be perceived as smart if they drop something that works in favour of an unproven tool just because it's new?
The same baseless assertion can be made regarding Eclipse, and it would be less doubtful given Eclipse's FLOSS nature.
Again, can we spend a minute discussing how idiotic is this fad-drive development belief? It's weird how, unlike in any engineering field, there's this cargo cult faith that new and untested is automatically better than old and reliable,and anyone who hasn't mindlessly jumped into a bandwagon is somehow the fool in the story.
What happened in 2020? Did I miss the end of the world?
In my bubble, Eclipse : IDEA is about 50:50, and luckily it doesn't matter because of Maven. I am one of those Eclipse users, and I am still waiting for someone to show me a feature that IDEA has and Eclipse doesn't. From my perspective it seems like the same thing, with different aesthetics (e.g. whether you can open multiple projects in the same window, or you need different windows) and keyboard shortcuts (which can be redefined on either side).
So I wouldn't try to convert people to Eclipse, but I also see no reason to convert to IDEA. I have a tool that works and does everything I need, and that makes me happy. Show me a functionality I am missing, and I may change my mind (some people already tried, and then it turned out that Eclipse had that, too); otherwise I am not interested in novelty for novelty's sake.
Uhm, I am not developing for Android. There, I imagine the situation may be quite different.
They need users to pay for IDEA to survive, so being open about not wanting to spend developer time to make it easier for people not to use IDEA that could be used to make IDEA better seems sensible from a business perspective. Seems like the community stepped up regardless.
You can code Kotlin on any device, using any IDE, anywhere, at any time, thanks to the fact that Kotlin source code is stored in plain text files and not in a proprietary binary format. You do have a language server for that. The language server happens to be not developed by JetBrains, but it doesn’t actually restrict you from being able to use it in any way.
In my book, “lock-in” means “you have to pay a single vendor or you can’t use the tool”. You seem to be defining it as “you have pay the vendor or live with maybe slightly worse code completion and no refactorings, until someone else supports these features in a free tool”. I don’t believe your definition to be justified.
I personally just use emacs.
Pylance is for sure, but it's built on the open source Pyright they provide, which is still pretty decent.
I think there's other things too but I don't recall the comprehensive list.
Honestly happens with python devs too when you open their project or code in a "real" IDE that checks for all these things.
I use both vscose and intellij, and I must say that even though vscode can sometimes feel snappier without any plugin running, it's missing a whole lot of features even with dedicated Microsoft plugins running, to the point it feels half-baked. I'm talking about things like basic refactoring support and even symbol recognition.
IDEs like intellij and Clion may have slightly longer startup times, but that doesn't really matter as you're only going to start the app a few times throughout the day.
Ultimately vscode is nice if all you want to do is open text files and Run regex searches, but the minute you want to run the most basic refactoring steps then it's faster and less frustrating to just start intellij, refactor, save files, and quit the app.
But Java/Kotlin is not native. Before electron, we hated Java apps because native apps are much faster
I develop in Pascal and Kotlin. When I had a laptop without SSD, Jetbrains IDE would take almost 30 minutes to start, while the Pascal native IDE could start in 30 seconds.
Instead of Microsoft's C/C++ extension use clangd.
Remote SSH and Remote Containers have alternatives as well but nothing as good.
Google and Red Hat's extensions work out of the box along with several thousand other extensions.
Didn’t know about this one, thanks.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fwcd.kot...
However, the actual experience is full of sharp corners. Get ready for nonexistent documentation, hacky plugins, poor debugging support, lack of proper native libraries and head spinning errors.
In general, it feels like doing carpentry using your plumber’s tools.
Groovy has no Netbeans support anymore. Who is to blame. Groovy? Groovy is better as a PL than Kotlin. But Kotlin is no match in terms of performance and pragmatism. I use both instead of Java and I never looked back.
Kotlin the entire language is about selling IDEA licenses.
Ever tried to read Kotlin in plaintext? It's terrible. The language makes you need the IDEA hints they give you to read it.
If it wasn't for Google giving wind to their sails, the Kotlin ship wouldn't have gone anywhere.
In 2019, 41% of Kotlin devs claimed to work on web back-ends. In 2020 it was 47%. In 2021 the survey changed wording but "server-side development" had increased to 52% of Kotlin devs.
Nice play there with the Java version numbers, it is still Java.
I disagree. While the Google announcement to officially support Kotlin surely gave it a big boost, Kotlin was already in widespread use for Android development well before Google announced their support for it in May 2017. Additionally, it was also gaining traction for server side development since before the Google announcement. I had been evaluating Kotlin closely during this time, and made the decision to start using Kotlin in our (primarily Java and entirely server-side) company codebase in late 2016 because I was already convinced Kotlin had a bright future. We weren't the only ones who thought this, I was tracking multiple other companies in our space (financial tech) that were evaluating and/or already moving to it too.
https://talkingkotlin.com/the-first-kotlin-commit-in-android...
It certainly would. Like so many other JVM languages. Android is what makes kotlin stand out from that crowd.
Arguably "particularly well supported by IntelliJ" is another thing that makes kotlin stand out from the crowd, but that's a two-edged sword. I'd expect the average JVM person to see that as roughly a tie between a quality and a cost (more lock-in).