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Comment by tsujp | Hacker News Reader

What happens when you now want to work in say.. Crystal, or Shell, or Rust, or Zig, or any other language for which there is not an IDE (even those also by JetBrains) which is 1:1 feature compatible to IntelliJ? Not all JetBrains IDEs have the same features. Rider (for .NET) only recently got remote editing support which IntelliJ already had for instance.

Now you're only as good as your tool (IntelliJ) and you cannot work with any other language or tool which isn't 1:1 feature complete.

If you had an extensible text editor beit vim, neovim, Sublime Text, emacs, VS Code or others then you could add extensions or features per language and keep using your single core tool (said text editor) with a configuration per-language.

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I can use text editors and other IDEs just fine. An IDE gives me more power and for 99% of my work I can live within it. I'm just slower.

I used Visual Studio when working with C# which is fine. Not as great. Didn't get a chance to do either Zig or Rust in practice (both look great and I would want to go there).

This argument is like arguing against shoes because of "what will you do when you're barefoot".

I think its more like "what will you do when you need need hiking boots and you've got snow shoes and no budget"

If I have no budget then I'm probably not a professional. Would you expect a contractor to build your house with just a hammer just because he ran out of cash buying the materials?

I accept that some people live in poorer countries. I work with a lot of them and spend a great deal of time abroad. Even they have more powerful machines than the median and they get great discounts for those machines. Maybe not a machine as powerful as this but somethings that can still make the IDE fly.

I think you've just answered your own question.

I have to admit I'm guilty of this, so much so that I'm tending towards discussing programming language features is moot without discussing the available tooling. In fact, I'm starting to think tooling is (slightly) more important.

Tooling and an active ecosystem around a language are generally more important for most projects. Lang-feature-X, on its own, is almost never the reason a project succeeds or fails. An active community fostering discussion about the best ways to address particular problems, with an ecosystem of libraries and examples that show one or more ways to deal with those problems - that is useful. As the language develops, the ecosystem will incorporate those newer features to build on the previous approach.

That's the neat part, you don't.

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