> People moved from IntelliJ to VSC because it was faster, simpler and language-agnostic, instead JetBrains blamed users for not using advanced features like CPU profiling which most people don't use daily. They are jumping on simple-editor train now. Better late than never
From my experience, most people who nowadays start programming, flock to vscode because it's free, used in most tutorials and then they simply do not understand why a certain paid IDE could be better, because they never tried it. Which is right with their statement. People keep parroting about greatness of vscode because it gets them through the day of making hello world apps and never have to actually debug more complex code or work with bigger codebases. Does it work in big projects for some(usually experienced) poeple? Sure. Is it the best way of working? Usually no(in my opinion at least).
I agree with this a lot - I went through a progression from simple -> full IDEs personally - writing a mix of PHP and JS for the web, along with C# for console apps, some python, and some terraform - I used to use a mix of a generic text editor with syntax highlighting and full MS Visual Studio.
Then it was VS Code, because VS Code gave me basic code completion and debugging which beat the text editor, and was massively faster than full MS Visual Studio. But VS Code's debugging features are buggy at best, PHP is a community supported language only, the .NET support is very easy to get tremendously confused/broken, and Python support for code completion never seems to work for locally installed packages etc.
Now I use the JetBrains suite of IDEs - PHPStorm, Rider, PyCharm do code completion, suggestions, etc on a scale that none of the VS Code community or MS plugins provide. PyCharm has really nice support for dealing with Pipenv. Rider has a NuGet integration. Rider debugging has always worked for me. An official JetBrains plugin provides the single best terraform authoring experience I've used. For me it really is the best solution.
Yes, the JetBrains IDEs are heavier than VS Code, and yes they cost money, but you're not cobbling together a solution from a disparate set of plugins and crossing your fingers. There's actual support.
With web development I find there's a lot of resistance to paying for dev tools - people are used to free. Additionally practically everyone seems to suggest VS Code at entry level to new developers. But once your project is non-trivial, it really isn't that good of an experience, in my opinion.
It's a bit like the dynamic vs. static typing situation. New comers often prefer languages like Python at first for their simplicity, only to "rediscover" that static typing is so much more manageable later in their career.
My career has been the opposite. I grew up on C, C++, then Java. Now I'm on dynamically typed languages and appreciate their advantages and prefer them.
Yeah context is required for these discussions. Anyone will love coding small digestible functions in python in a jupyter notebook. It's really fast. You might make a lot of mistakes (wrong import, wrong type, incorrect variable reference etc) but since the edit/refresh cycle is instant, it's not a big deal. Let's see how you feel about Python trying to application that has to be industrial strength and grown quickly for a business.
VSCode has debugging built in and can connect to various runtimes.
Not that I ever use that - I prefer sticking with the language native tools, and I rarely require anything beyond inspecting runtime values and simple benchmarking.
Maybe this comes from the perspective of Java, where you need an IDE to do proper debugging, building/starting an application requires a gazillion command line arguments, and you have layers upon layers of abstraction to drill through? Those are pains worth taking away, but don't apply to all languages or platforms.
Recently CLion got decent Rust debugging. While I love rust-analyser and its integration with VSCode, the debugger in CLion is worth its weight in gold (like a ton or so).
Would I prefer a native IDE for Rust? Maybe one that doesn't require 4GiB of Ram to operate? Yes.
Refactoring, "show me where this class, function, variable is used", "show me a class hierarchy", "analyze my code and tell me where I'm not using best practices and suggest the best fixes and apply my selected one", are places where a full-fledged IDE shines. An editor won't do those, or most of those. A 15-minute task turns into a 20-second blip.
VSCode does all of the former, at least for the two main languages I work with, TypeScript and Go. Prettier, ESLint and golangci-lint handle the style checks.
JetBrains says the problem is “users are unaware of what an IDE can do” but maybe it is the other way around?
Currently I am using Emacs and Goland as my main IDEs/editors and have tried vscode but the thing is - what vscode can support entirely depends on what LSP server can support. This can make or break vscode. For example - both vscode/emacs (via lsp-mode) throw errors/warnings in multi-module go projects. Even worse, if you are hacking your build chain the way some projects like Kubernetes do(via staging directory), lsp-server refuses to work entirely in `staging/` directory of the project.
I also saw that switching branches can confuse lsp-server.
All of these problems are basically non-existant in Goland(Intellij).So depending on complexity of a project, I would day it is worth using an IDE.
What’s nice that Jetbrains does in Typescript that VSCode doesn’t is automated refactoring. I can change or move a function anywhere in my project and all references are automatically updated.
VSCode does it to some extend, but the difference is night and day.
You mean like the 64000 packages required for a simple hello world with 34 vulnerabilities and ads, and what takes more time to “compile” for trivial AST-manipulations than a god-damn optimizing compiler do?
I switched from a JetBrains IDE to VS Code for one reason: I don't want to build a C++ codebase on my laptop. It requires a lot of processing power, takes a long time, kills the battery, and makes the fan go off.
I'm willing to use VS Code Remote and sacrifice some features to not have to deal with that. My employer doesn't really care if I provision a big EC2 instance for development. I'll take a look at Fleet a little later on.
I've tried all of JetBrains' remote working solutions (there are confusingly many now, 3-4?) and they all seem unusable for my use case, where VSCode (or indeed ssh + vim) just works. And my use case is not particularly special, C++ with CMake and some wrapper scripts to pull in dependencies.
The only solution that works OK is Projector, but I can achieve the exact same thing but less buggy with VNC.
I moved to VSC because I need one editor, one keyboard shortcuts to learn for 4 programming languages I use daily. I use it on quite big projects, openapi-generator and keycloak and it's fine, I like it, but my teammates tell me I'm a weirdo for using it.
I use vscode because it's very flexible and does 99 percent of what a "full ide" does but at 10x the speed. I have a few thousand other developers who produce great extensions for me that do many things. I've also used just about every ide in existence over my career and I've never used a feature that vscode didn't have built in or in an extension.
You're making the same mistake they are by assuming developers are just ignorant of what an ide is, and it's going to sink intellij eventually.
Vscode is more than suitable for big projects, Its not just for hello world projects. VSCode is best tool for TypeScript/JavaScript/Dart.
For Java/C# it probably is not.
You should really try out JetBrains' TS/JS features. It's great, as good as anything VSC can give you, and if you're used to their IDEs (say, for Ruby, which is nowhere near as good on VSC) you're better off using the JB IDE.
From my experience, most people who nowadays start programming, flock to vscode because it's free, used in most tutorials and then they simply do not understand why a certain paid IDE could be better, because they never tried it. Which is right with their statement. People keep parroting about greatness of vscode because it gets them through the day of making hello world apps and never have to actually debug more complex code or work with bigger codebases. Does it work in big projects for some(usually experienced) poeple? Sure. Is it the best way of working? Usually no(in my opinion at least).