I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer.

My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it.

The idea that VSCode is the future doesn't seem right to me. JetBrains products allow you to do so much out of the box, without installing a million plugins that may or may not work. In IntelliJ I can write a half baked statement like `new Foo()`, and then Alt + Enter my way to it being `foo = new Foo();` as a private member variable of the class in no time. If you take time to set up configuration it becomes even more powerful. Even these basics are more difficult in VSCode.

To me the future is IntelliJ for Java and all other languages should seek to have such a nicely integrated experience with an IDE.

I am not even sure I could write Java from scratch in Vim - its really that I'm using IntelliJ, not writing Java. Is this bad? In some pure sense, sure, you are further from the language. But I don't care because I can write and edit code some multiple faster than if I was in VSCode.

From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it as knowledge is scattered in many places and not always up to date. Then it still likes to stall from time to time or sometimes doesn't register key presses properly. It's a poor user experience, but even worse is that alternatives are often worse. I wish there was an editor with low latency, smart search, some proper file system database, so it doesn't take ages to open a directory and built in VCS support, that works quicker than manually issuing commands in a terminal.

I think the success of VSCode is because you can easily open it in your current directory from the terminal and it will show you your folder etc. without having to setup a project first and that you are ready to type you code quickly after opening. If I had to open PyCharm every time I want to try some Python in a new directory, I would probably start questioning my life choices. Before VSCode I would just use nano or Sublime.

JetBrains products _are_ pretty much the best. I think Android Studio + Kotlin is the best, most impressive IDE experience I've ever had. Mostly because Android Development in general is kinda hard, and Android Studio cleans it all up so nicely for you. It really outshines XCode in this regard.

I've never used CLion but I really want to.

That being said, I think it's clear that VSCode is, and will remain, dominant.

First: its free.

Second: it's simpler.

That alone is enough to make any product dominant. The fact that's it free, simple, and pretty much just works is pretty stunning.

VSCode for Unity Game Development kinda shocks me how you can literally install the IDE while the game is running and successfully attach a debugger. It's pretty wild how reliable it is.

I'm not a VSCode fan boy. I find that it lags on my PC sometimes. I kinda hate the "notifications" that it pops up with. And I don't like the auto update mechanism or the Welcome screen, but overall VSCode (or Codium) is clearly the next level of IDE.

I think Microsoft is going to build some really wild stuff on top of VSCode and Github.

I think there gonna come up with way to leverage the amount of data they can mine out of github repos to write code for you.

I'm pretty sure that's a big reason why they bought github.