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I recently blogged about the developer experience with server-side Kotlin at https://glennengstrand.info/software/coding/csharp/kotlin so you should know that the IntelliJ folks offer a community edition of their IDE that works great with Kotlin. You don't even need the IntelliJ IDE at all. I was able to code up that Kotlin service using VS Code which was also a great experience. Nothing felt limited or dummied down at all.

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The entire JVM ecosystem is built around "we all know you're using an IDE, right?" I among most folks who use Kotlin are aware of the Community Edition of IntelliJ. The price isn't the thing keeping me from using it. 1. an employer _should_ be covering that cost. 2. The tools is truly outstanding and well worth the 500 bucks (I'd argue it's not worth 500 bucks a year but...) With all of that said, I really don't enjoy the IDE experience. I do tend to write Kotlin + Quarkus in NeoVim... but the LSP is a volunteer effort. Meanwhile Rust and Go's LSPs are incredibly.

My biggest complaint against the JVM community will alwyas be, "don't expect that we can auto-import... document where methods/constant/imported vars come from".

Nice writeup, but it's kinda meaningless to consider import statements when comparing LOC as they're written for you in both C# and Kotlin. Also, just because the default code style doesn't like glob imports doesn't mean you have to roll with it - Kotlin isn't like Go where there's One True Style and everyone is expected to follow it. You can just turn on import globbing and optimization. That would presumably cause LOC to be much more similar.

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