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Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.

Yes, IntelliJ 8 was out in 2008. From my experience most of the progress since then has been keeping up with language and library updates.

When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2013.

I am still a little stunned by the rapid adoption of VSCode over IntelliJ and the original Visual Studio. Maybe being free was the important part, but I still chafe at the idea that we should configure our tools using JSON instead of just, you know, buttons and checkboxes.

Of course, VSCode and its ilk are jam packed with AI stuff I don’t not want, so it is mostly back to a fancy text editor for me.

Wasn’t Chrome mostly a wrapper on Webkit, though? You had to add the engineers who worked on Safari and KHTML before to the count..

Sounds like you're describing the shit show that is web development