>Well, I mean to be fair the coding services for most languages in vscode other than js (ie java, c, rust, python, go, php, c#, ruby specifically) suck totally compared to the JB tooling.
I have to disagree. JetBrains' tooling is superior for Java and Kotlin. For C#, Visual Studio is pretty good these days, even without Resharper. For everything else VSCode is unquestionably better. I can just point VSCode at a directory full of Python files with a virtualenv, and VSCode just "gets it", and lets me jump right in to editing, with autocomplete and suggestions. With PyCharm, I have to manually configure the interpreter root, set the project root, and wait for it to do a bunch of indexing before I can do anything at all. Yes, once it's all set up, I have marginally better suggestions, but as VSCode's Python tooling gets better, that setup cost becomes less and less worth it.
>The plug-ins for many languages are of massively varying quality and some of them really suck.
Agreed, but that cuts both ways. I would argue that, at this point, VSCode's Calva plugin for Clojure is superior to IntelliJ's Cursive. Similarly, I found VSCode's Rust plugin to be easier to set up and get started with in a WSL environment than the Rust plugin for CLion. Sure, VSCode's support for Java is a garbage fire and its support for Kotlin is nigh non-existent, but as far as I'm concerned, both sides have pretty huge blind-spots when it comes to languages that are "second-class citizens" for their respective ecosystems.
>Obviously, support languages with the full range of JB tooling, that is categorically better than the pathetic support vscode offers for, say, c#.
Whether the tooling can be categorically better is difficult to say. After all, the architecture of Fleet is pretty much the same as the architecture of VSCode. They're both editors which use a client-server architecture to enable suggestions and remote editing. I'm not sure how much of JetBrains' IDE work will translate over, and I'm not sure how much of it they want to bring over. As I stated in my other comment [1], unlike Microsoft, JetBrains doesn't have anything except its IDEs. They don't have a cloud platform that is more important to them than IDE sales. The IDEs are everything to them, and instead of making the IDEs better they're off chasing taillights.
This seems like a mid-2010s Mozilla maneuver (like FirefoxOS) and I hope it doesn't do as much damage to JetBrains as FirefoxOS did to Mozilla.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29377859