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Comment by throwaway999777 | Hacker News Reader

Was there a need to develop a Java IDE in Java to begin with? I can understand dog fooding by building IDE-primarily-for-lang in lang itself. But were there technical reasons?

Or maybe Java just was the best alternative [at the time].

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It's worked out pretty well for them I'd say. Consider that any developer can write a plugin for it easily, that cannot segfault the entire app, and which runs on all the platforms the IDE supports. That's just one advantage. Higher productivity of feature development is probably another.

To see how things could have been different, look at Visual Studio which is still a 32 bit program even in 2015. Users of it complain that it simply can't load big projects without running out of RAM even if their computer has enough. The VS team says they aren't doing a 64 bit port because it's such a big code base and besides, their plugin model is fully native. And of course it's Windows only.

> Higher productivity of feature development is probably another.

So productive that they had to invent a new language for the JVM platform?

At the time (~2002?), I think Java was a very reasonable choice for an cross-platform IDE. As more programming language research and different programming paradigms continue to gain mainstream adoption, Java's emphasis on backwards compatibility and stability makes it a bit difficult to change some of the initial design decisions that Java started out. However, since Java is so mature with an even more mature eco-system and an incredible runtime specification (JVM), it made sense to build a modern day "blue collar" language that could be classified as "Java, if it started out today." With that in mind, and some of the same principles that Java was founded on, Kotlin delivers on this promise. IMHO, it is the only JVM language that really does bridge this gap.

They didn't have to - JetBrains has been around for a long time and Kotlin is new. The productivity benefits mostly come from things like fast compile times, garbage collection etc.

As a user of it, I appreciate that I've been able to use it on three different OS's with minimal adjustment, which Java facilitates more so than other languages, especially other languages which would be reasonable candidates for a thick-client application like this.

The three founders of JetBrains started a plugin named Renamer out of need, while working with Java code at TogetherSoft. That was over 15 years ago.

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