>It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode
It's also paid vs free. For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.
It's also paid vs free. For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.
I used to pay Jetbrains annually, out of my own pocket. I continued paying fir a personal license even after my employer bought me another license. Jetbrains then made a stupid, greedy decision[1] (and walked or back within days), but I was done with them and canceled my subscription.
Since then, my experience/growth, languages tech stacks and codebases have connived to make Jetbrains superior discoverability moot (not using Java!), I found out other IDEs are good enough for me.
1. Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. The fact that they thought this was acceptable and announced it means they cannot be trusted, IMO.
No they didn't. This is a total mischaracterisation of how JB's subscription works.
I don't understand how you could possibly have read my comment as describing their current licensing practices, with the tenses I was using.
You can go read up on the disastrous announcement and the followup at https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbr...
IDEs as in plural, like several IDEs? What IDEs are you using now? I'm yet to find something that is as good for several languages as Idea Ultimate? Yes, for some languages Vscode plugin is superior, but overall as a polyglot I find Idea experience the best all things considered.
This also really baffles me. You can see it a lot in various discussions even here on HN.
And if Microsoft decides to kill VSCode, I seriously doubt anyone is going to keep maintaining it at the place where it is now. Even if someone decides to continue maintaining the base editor, Microsoft abandoning it will pretty quickly dry up the plugin ecosystem.
"It's open source, so it will always be available to me" only really makes sense if your backup plan is to maintain it yourself. In the case of VSCode, you are relying on a whole ecosystem continuing to survive after the sponsor abandons it.
Usually what happens is that after enough years have passed, the company funding the free IDE starts to wonder why exactly they're spending so much money to give away the results. The original passion-project founders have moved on, leaving behind maintenance devs who aren't motivated to defend it. Eventually it gets stripped to a handful of devs and donated to Apache. In the meantime IntelliJ continues to develop new features.
The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.
Exactly, especially since VSCode is also an "open-core" product, just like JetBrain's products (the community versions are open-source).
The difference is that the other parts are still free, as in beer. But this is precisely what makes the offer weird to me and makes me think there's a shady angle being played.