Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

Presumably not because it actually has fewer features, but because "the debugger" now has 150 options instead of like 5.

Also, these super-featured IDEs still won't support languages that Jetbrains doesn't have a specific IDE for. For instance, Delphi. Sure they'll support syntax highlighting somehow, and there might be one plugin.

VSCode probably has 20+ search results if you look up Delphi

People in this thread mentioned brilliant factors among those IDE/editors, but the 2 cents I want to add is their difference is related to the way they work, or how people work on them.

VSCode: LSP reflects the mentality of VSCode - it's extensible, it's working but it usually doesn't offer first-class experiences. It usually aims to serve the intersection or the common part of languages first, then the specific language.

The idea is very akin to Emacs, in which the community tries to find the abstraction of functionality, and then people can work on different implementations at the same time - there's Helm for completion, and Flycheck for checking in the first place, then there's a whole bunch of implementations. The good is it solves the m*n problem, but the bad is the experience is not good as tailored for specific languages. Actually, one specific struggle in the Emacs community right now is choosing between LSP and language-specific plugins.

Intellij: It is on the other side of the spectrum. It's polished, feels pragmatic for major languages they're targeting. Unlike LSP and VSCode, It was aimed to be the best Java IDE, and it did it. Now you can see the inheritance panel for a lot of languages that don't even really care about inheritance.

So IMO it's like Conway's law. The key difference between VSCode and Intellij is because of the way they work - VSCode was built on community, and Microsoft is more like a facilitator. While IntelliJ is driven by a single company, and the plugins and communities are supplement features.

In my experience, IDEA is just better in the things it does well and just worse in the things it doesn't. Without spending days searching for extensions and configurations, Jetbrains' products beat Code every time when it comes to Java and the related ecosystem. When it comes to C/C++, Clion is one of the best IDEs there are, and VS code can only get close through extensions and a buttload of JSON.

For frontend, both suck equally as much, but that's just because modern development has turned into a Javascript mess and frontend developers seem to make it their personal mission to change up and replace the entire ecosystem every five years. No IDE can keep up with such an ecosystem without becoming janky and unpredictable.

The language server feature of Code makes it excellent for languages that weren't originally included in the product. For example, Clion has Rust support, but that support comes nowhere near what VS Code can do with the Rust Analyzer addon. Other languages have similar problems with Jetbrains' products; the language server for Code makes it integrate with other languages so well that the two barely even compete.

But, for most of the work I do, the advantages of VS Code seem irrelevant to me. If you develop in a quirky or brand new language, use WSL2 (because you can't or won't use normal Linux) or if you're writing C# code on and for Windows, then it makes sense to use Code, but I just don't see a lot of people with these problems.

The biggest advantage of VS Code I can see is that through its addons, it gets to become fully-featured for free. You might argue that it's open source as well, but as far as I know there's still functionality that Microsoft has hidden away (C# debugging) in open source builds due to licensing issues. In my opinion the pricing on Jetbrains' tools is pretty good; the tools have increased my productivity enough that I'm more than willing to invest in these tools.