12 ms·

Free for students: Professional developer tools from JetBrains

143 points by aphextron 10y ago

ungzd 10y ago
Do students need enterprise Java IDEs (and IDEs for other languages designed by enterpirse Java developers)?
- unixhero 10y ago
  Yes. These IDE's bring phenomenal value.
- toennisforst 10y ago
  From my personal experience, a good vs. a mediocre IDE can be the tipping point between really getting into developing or only doing it because you have to. Of course CS students who come to university already programming and with a strong intrinsic desire will overcome difficulties regardless, but a good chunk of fellow students in business informatics/information systems were turned off by complicated setups and steep learning curves of IDEs and chose to steer clear of technical specializations.
- AnthonBerg 10y ago
  I honestly do not experience any of Jetbrains' products as enterprise Java IDEs. To me, they are very well thought out tools to fluently automate menial tasks of development, quickly navigate context and structure, and "know what I mean" and take care of bookkeeping when I wish to shape code by refactoring by virtue of Jetbrains' very high capacity for writing powerful language parser and introspection and couple it with a powerful user interface with only a relatively mild learning curve. So yes, I do strongly believe that students will benefit from using Jetbrains' tools to get to the core of programming - as part of a balanced and supervised diet of ideas from very low abstraction to high. I see no use in burdening students with feeding little text files to compilers, pushing the semicolon button, gardening header files, or cranking package manager handles.
- arikrak 10y ago
  I think the community edition of IntelliJ should usually be enough for a college student programming in Java. Though if they're using other languages or frameworks they'll want the commercial editions.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    It depends on what you're building. The lack of Java EE support, JavaScript support, and Spring support are pretty notable exclusions. You don't need to be doing enterprise programming to find the dependency injection pattern useful, it's very nice for building testable code. And Java EE is the beating heart of a Java webdev backend. Almost everything is built on Servlets and Filters and the web.xml configuration mappings, even if these are abstracted away (and the most common abstraction is - wait for it - Spring+Spring MVC). I guess you can always write Javascript without an IDE but it's definitely nice to use an IDE instead of just winging it with a browser console.
- Delmania 10y ago
  Speaking as someone who built his master's these using Notepad and javac, I can say had I used IntelliJ, I would have had a much more enjoyable time. Students don't need these tools, but they do go along way to help make them more productive and enjoy the experience. I also wouldn't call IntelliJ (or Visual Studio) as "enterprise" tools. They are definitely the product of people who spend a LOT of time building software in the supported languages.
  - egeozcan 10y ago
    What are "enterprise" tools anyway? Sincerely asking. Is it a support thing?
    - SiVal 10y ago
      You can define "enterprise tools" any way you like, but there are software tools that cost millions of dollars that only an "enterprise" would ever buy, and tools like the JetBrains tools that are priced at a level where many individuals buy them for themselves. Many tools like this are still very popular within enterprises, as are many free, open-source tools, so you might mean "commonly used within enterprises" when you say "enterprise tools" but it's more common (I believe) for people to mean expensive tools that ONLY an enterprise would ever buy when they say "enterprise tools".
      - egeozcan 10y ago
        Thanks, that confirms my intuition. So maybe the marketers use it to scare-away the people who wouldn't be able to afford the product and would waste their time by contacting them for a price and even request demos.
    - jasode 10y ago
      As an example of "enterprise", scroll all the way down to the bottom of the IntelliJ page[1] for the section "Choose your edition". In the "Ultimate" column, you'll see extra features such as support for IBM Rational Clearcase, MS TFS, and Java EE. Hobbyists, students, and most startups in the web/mobile space don't use those corporate/enterprise products.[2] Since this new announcement makes the Ultimate version free for students, I suppose some observers wonder why college students couldn't just use the Community edition which was already free. [1]http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/#out-of-tools http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/#out-of-tools [2]the IBM Clearcase of $2000 is example of "enterprise" pricing: http://estore.gemini-systems.com/ibm/software-license/rational-testing-software/software-change-and-configuration-management/rational-clearcase-multisite/ http://estore.gemini-systems.com/ibm/software-license/ration... (Most college students would probably just use Git/Github instead of IBM Clearcase.)
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > Do students need enterprise Java IDEs (and IDEs for other languages designed by enterpirse Java developers)? Yes, there was a software project that we as students built with Java EE (we used Eclipse at that time) - we had to build on legacy code that another student wrote for his diploma thesis in Java EE. This is surely not typical, but sometimes it happens. I also like Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise, which one can get by the Dreamspark Premium program (I use it mostly for C++ and C# development), though there are many features that were once Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate only that are now also included in the Professional/Community Edition, too (for example Static Code Analysis in C++). So the difference is much smaller than in earlier times, but some testing tools, which I use, (in particular Code Coverage) are still Enterprise only: > https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/
- pmontra 10y ago
  For Java yes, but learn first javac and the command line tools. Then you understand why it's unbearable developing non trivial programs without an IDE. Too much time wasted. For Node, Python and Ruby you can do without an IDE.
  - wcummings 10y ago
    You could still use maven w/o an IDE, it's really not that bad.
    - pmontra 10y ago
      It's mainly for compiling automatically when the code changes and for hot reloading. It's important for working with web apps. For desktop maybe not but it's been maybe 10 years since I built a desktop Java application.
      - paulmd 10y ago
        Maven is actually very important since it is a "generic" project format that all IDEs understand, it handles dependency management/downloading, etc. Ant and Gradle are nowhere near as useful since they are not a format an IDE can understand natively. They are a build script, not a project file, so you need to keep another project file in sync for each client you're using. You don't even necessarily need to be building a Java target for Maven to be useful. It's also a common way to build continuous-integration build scripts for things like Docker packages, database artifacts, etc.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Do students of carpentry need an "enterprise-grade" hammer with nails? Yes. You need to practice to become your most productive self. If you aren't productive you aren't going to find someone who will hire you.
kyriakos 10y ago
PHPStorm is one of the best things that ever happened to PHP. Not sure if they still do but JetBrains used to offer its IDEs for free to open source developers.
- hulahoof 10y ago
  I just checked, they still do for core members of open source projects: https://www.jetbrains.com/buy/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/buy/opensource/
  - chx 10y ago
    I qualify for open source PHPStorm three times at least (Drupal 7, Drupal 8, PHP documentation) and yet, I love PHPStorm enough to buy it :)
    - kyriakos 10y ago
      Indeed it's one of those applications that are constantly updated adding features we need before we realise we did. Well worth it.
- toxican 10y ago
  I'm not a fan of subscription-based models for software, but PHPStorm is good enough for me to ignore that. Plus it gets cheaper yearly for the first 3 years.
  - nolok 10y ago
    I agree and I was a bit disappointed at first being a long time customer, but they addressed that with the perpetual license. Also, for long term customer like me, it ended up costing less (I also got one year free when renewing, although I think that was a limited offer).
    - toxican 10y ago
      It left me kicking myself for not buying PHPStorm sooner so I could've gotten in on the perpetual license pricing. But oh well! It paid for itself pretty quickly, so I can't complain!
hulahoof 10y ago
Jetbrains are my IDE of choice, I started with phpStorm when I was doing webdev and have used most flavours during my studies - I recommend anyone studying to give this offer a try it is incredible value. Edit: I'd like to add all that's needed to get the student licence is a valid university email, at least for myself.
haffla 10y ago
Since at least two years ago I'm doing exactly that. Sorry that you only found out now ;D
infinity0 10y ago
they're IDE's what?
- sofaofthedamned 10y ago
  'Their', surely?
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    The plural possessive still doesn't match the singular verb. "JetBrains" simply won't parse as a singular noun, so "offers" should be "offer".
0xCMP 10y ago
That also includes Reshaper, PyCharm, Webstorm, and CLion. These tools are awesome for students. Somewhere else mentioned if students really need these kinds of tools? To write code? Probably not, it's better if they spent the time to use Vim/Emacs or just got going with Atom/VSCode/Sublime. But none of those editors support the ease of clicking on something and seeing what that is. A class, a function, etc. Jetbrain's support for this in any language they support is probably the best anywhere and the editor itself is damn good. I try my very best to get rid of it and I always find myself coming back. Rarely can anything match it's features which once you learn how to use them you'll often need on a day to day basis.
- spapas82 10y ago
  For Java I'd say yes, students do need an IDE (or to be more specific their life would be very difficult without an IDE). It is really difficult to write java, even trivial programs without an IDE (because of Java's long package and class names). Since IntelliJ Studio is the defacto standard in Java IDEs (having surpassed Eclipse and Netbeans) I think that it is really great for students to be able use that IDE for their student projects. Of course the usage of the IDE must not prevent then from familiaring themselves with classpaths and compiling a Java program with more than one packages through the command line!
  - 0xCMP 10y ago
    I mostly do Python and Node (usually all in PyCharm), but I agree for Java it's nice to have an editor.
  - triplebit 10y ago
    > Since IntelliJ Studio is the defacto standard in Java IDEs (having surpassed Eclipse and Netbeans) Incorrect. Eclipse remains superior and is in far greater use across the world and the enterprise landscape.
    - AnthonBerg 10y ago
      Having also used Eclipse, I strongly disagree about its superiority; If it is popular, then I believe that is explained by its price and the self-sustaining property of ubiquity. I myself found Eclipse cumbersome and lacking in capacity. I do respect others' preference for it, but it cannot be said to be objectively superior.
Zekio 10y ago
IntelliJ IDE support for hi-dpi displays is great compared to netbeans.
joelthelion 10y ago
Learn open source tools, you'll be able to use them freely your entire life. These tools may be shinier, but they offer no real productivity gains in the long run.
- viewer5 10y ago
  Any recommendations to stand in for these?
  - iNate2000 10y ago
    Ugly Eclipse keeps pulling me away from shiny IntelliJ. I've been switching to Java from C# for the last year or so. At my company, the Java developers that I most admire use Eclipse. Coming from Visual Studio, the weirdest thing about Eclipse was having multiple projects loaded in the same Eclipse instance. But as I get used to it, switching back to IntelliJ confuses me. I get lost with the multiple instances.
    - gravypod 10y ago
      The huge advantage with using multiple projects at the same time is you can trivially factor out mutual pieces of code and include them as libraries. It's a really important thing for extremely integrated large projects that have big overarching goals. For instance the game I'm writing as a server and a client. The idea of the networking components are abstracted away from the server and client. They include a library all together that handles everything. They don't need their own implementations and I don't need to switch back and forth in the IDEs to get to the right projects, start them, compile the library project, and go back to each sub-project and include it. It's so much nicer when working on client-server architectures. That's why I love eclipse
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  "but they offer no real productivity gains in the long run." I guess if you define 'long run' however you want... sure. Your point may stand. For almost everyone I know, JetBrains tools have delivered a massive, measurable amount of productivity gain, compared to any other tools they were using (commercial or free). "no real productivity gain" is highly subjective, and doesn't come close to matching the experience of most of the developers I know in their day to day work.
douche 10y ago
When I was in college, Microsoft had DreamSpark, which was a similar kind of thing (use your school email, get a bunch of free licenses to VS, SQL Server, etc). I don't know if they still do it, but especially in those days, it was great, because the free Express editions hadn't quite come out yet, and when they did, they were pretty gimped. Using a real version of Visual C++ was head and shoulders better than trying to fight with Eclipse, or CodeBlocks, or DevC++ in those days.
- provemewrong 10y ago
  They still do, I ued it to grab Windows 8 and 10, Visual Studio, Access and Visio. They rebranded it as Microsoft Imagine like a month ago though.
oliwarner 10y ago
Always very wary about suggesting people cut their teeth in the warm embrace of a IDE. It's often unrealistic. If it's the industry standard —like it was and probably still is completely normal to use VS.NET for .NET development— that might be okay but reducing exposure to things that the rest of your industry like a makefile or [gp]db, Maven/Gradle/Ant, or whatever... It's a real disservice to your students. If you're an educator and you want your students to get a job, make sure you're teaching the stuff we're actually using.
- jsight 10y ago
  I'm not sure that I get your point. Is there anything about using an IDE that keeps you from learning a build system? Although I do think it is unfortunately that a lot of CS courses pay little attention to build tools.
  - oliwarner 10y ago
    There's nothing stopping you learning other stuff but I've found from both personal experience and dealing with new hires, people like to stick with what they learnt on. My experience is green graduates who grew up on IDEs struggle —for much longer than you'd expect— to get on with command line scripting and tools. They avoid a lot of very necessary experience when you have an IDE do everything. I'll stop well short of saying "real programmers only use VIM" but experience is everything, especially when differentiating juniors. Learning how to do everything with one IDE is a great way to get very little real-world experience.
    - jsight 10y ago
      That is a fair point, although my experience was that the IDE didn't matter much. Most of my fellow students didn't learn build systems regardless of whether they worked in the popular IDE at the time or just a text editor. I would hope that build systems would be taught regardless of the IDE.
triplebit 10y ago
Eclipse is also free and it's better.
- what_ever 10y ago
  I don't know about Eclipse being better. I switched to IntelliJ two years ago and I love it. I find it much better, faster and less buggy compared to Eclipse.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    It depends on what you are using it for. IntellJ's maven integration is to die for. Eclipse has a better auto-completion engine. IntellJ is far less resource intensive but eclipse has some features (mutli-projects in one 'solution') that IntellJ won't add.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
At this point, the only major tech company whose products/services I gladly pay for is JetBrains. I wish them all the very best.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  They seem to have become what Borland should have.
  - vintagedave 10y ago
    Embarcadero has those tools now, and those tools are very alive and kicking. Have you looked at them recently? (Except JBuilder, the Java IDE. Did you use it back in the day? What did you think of it?)
    - Roboprog 10y ago
      I haven't used Borland's stuff (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, TP-Windows, Debugger) since the early 90s. I bought a copy of Delphi around 96, but never really used it, as my late 90s job was more off in the unix side of things by then (Linux at home, but IRIX/AIX at work). No employer wants Borland's languages now. I suspect Kotlin will suffer the same fate. When I first started doing ANSI C work in the early 90s (several platforms, including non POSIX), it was helpful to be able to use Turbo C[++] / Turbo Debugger to work on an otherwise standardized language. That seems to be what JetBrains is doing best, now.
    - Roboprog 10y ago
      I have not used Embarcadero's Delphi, just their database client. I have used Free Pascal, though. Interesting, but no demand for it :-( The whole 90s C/C++ thing was such a debacle. Running C for app work in the internet era reminded me of "Hunt for Red October" - "Next, he'll be removing the safeties from his torpedos" - "you arrogant ass, now you have killed us!". Widespread internet adoption was the "extinction level event" for C/C++ apps. (along with faster processors and garbage collection) Anyway, if more companies had used an Algol descended language that actually did bounds checking, and made less use of points constantly, the crisis that forced Java adoption could have been avoided.
calebsurfs 10y ago
I've been using pyCharm for the last 2 years and its code completion has helped me code and learn at a much faster pace than other editors. It offers code suggestions for any module that has been imported in addition to everything in the current script. Sublime and vim's code completion seem very primitive in comparison. That said, I usually use the free Community Edition because it loads faster.
- junnan 10y ago
  Emacs's elpy package is also great at auto-complete. I haven't used PyCharm myself but Emacs is more than enough. Also, most of my other programming are done in Emacs.
user5994461 10y ago
> all you need is a valid ISIC card. Too bad for non American non UK students.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  The card is available in over 130 countries, according to the website.
novaleaf 10y ago
Resharper is great, totally awesome features for C#... unless you have a large professional project. The performance tanks and features become unreliable the larger the project gets. This has been a problem with every resharper version since 5.x
LeanderK 10y ago
I am currently a CS Student and use a lot of the tools from jet brains. It's awesome that they are free! To give a bit of an perspective/motivation: They make it really easy to try something out. You can click things, visualise things and get guided by the IDE, then they scale with your skill until you never click things and only use the shortcuts. There is a plugin for nearly everything and the documentation (NOT the openapi-doc, thats horrible or nonexistent) is great. I would not want to teach an freshmen (is this correct? first year university?) javascript with vim/emacs.
SmooL 10y ago
One thing I love about the jetbrains suite is that the keyboard shortcuts remain mostly the same across all of them - whether I'm coding python in PyCharm or javascript in Webstorm, I can use the same keyboard shortcuts.

143 points by aphextron 10y ago

ungzd 10y ago

Do students need enterprise Java IDEs (and IDEs for other languages designed by enterpirse Java developers)?

unixhero 10y ago
Yes. These IDE's bring phenomenal value.
toennisforst 10y ago
From my personal experience, a good vs. a mediocre IDE can be the tipping point between really getting into developing or only doing it because you have to. Of course CS students who come to university already programming and with a strong intrinsic desire will overcome difficulties regardless, but a good chunk of fellow students in business informatics/information systems were turned off by complicated setups and steep learning curves of IDEs and chose to steer clear of technical specializations.
AnthonBerg 10y ago
I honestly do not experience any of Jetbrains' products as enterprise Java IDEs. To me, they are very well thought out tools to fluently automate menial tasks of development, quickly navigate context and structure, and "know what I mean" and take care of bookkeeping when I wish to shape code by refactoring by virtue of Jetbrains' very high capacity for writing powerful language parser and introspection and couple it with a powerful user interface with only a relatively mild learning curve. So yes, I do strongly believe that students will benefit from using Jetbrains' tools to get to the core of programming - as part of a balanced and supervised diet of ideas from very low abstraction to high. I see no use in burdening students with feeding little text files to compilers, pushing the semicolon button, gardening header files, or cranking package manager handles.
arikrak 10y ago
I think the community edition of IntelliJ should usually be enough for a college student programming in Java. Though if they're using other languages or frameworks they'll want the commercial editions.
- paulmd 10y ago
  It depends on what you're building. The lack of Java EE support, JavaScript support, and Spring support are pretty notable exclusions. You don't need to be doing enterprise programming to find the dependency injection pattern useful, it's very nice for building testable code. And Java EE is the beating heart of a Java webdev backend. Almost everything is built on Servlets and Filters and the web.xml configuration mappings, even if these are abstracted away (and the most common abstraction is - wait for it - Spring+Spring MVC). I guess you can always write Javascript without an IDE but it's definitely nice to use an IDE instead of just winging it with a browser console.
Delmania 10y ago
Speaking as someone who built his master's these using Notepad and javac, I can say had I used IntelliJ, I would have had a much more enjoyable time. Students don't need these tools, but they do go along way to help make them more productive and enjoy the experience. I also wouldn't call IntelliJ (or Visual Studio) as "enterprise" tools. They are definitely the product of people who spend a LOT of time building software in the supported languages.
- egeozcan 10y ago
  What are "enterprise" tools anyway? Sincerely asking. Is it a support thing?
  - SiVal 10y ago
    You can define "enterprise tools" any way you like, but there are software tools that cost millions of dollars that only an "enterprise" would ever buy, and tools like the JetBrains tools that are priced at a level where many individuals buy them for themselves. Many tools like this are still very popular within enterprises, as are many free, open-source tools, so you might mean "commonly used within enterprises" when you say "enterprise tools" but it's more common (I believe) for people to mean expensive tools that ONLY an enterprise would ever buy when they say "enterprise tools".
    - egeozcan 10y ago
      Thanks, that confirms my intuition. So maybe the marketers use it to scare-away the people who wouldn't be able to afford the product and would waste their time by contacting them for a price and even request demos.
  - jasode 10y ago
    As an example of "enterprise", scroll all the way down to the bottom of the IntelliJ page[1] for the section "Choose your edition". In the "Ultimate" column, you'll see extra features such as support for IBM Rational Clearcase, MS TFS, and Java EE. Hobbyists, students, and most startups in the web/mobile space don't use those corporate/enterprise products.[2] Since this new announcement makes the Ultimate version free for students, I suppose some observers wonder why college students couldn't just use the Community edition which was already free. [1]http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/#out-of-tools http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/#out-of-tools [2]the IBM Clearcase of $2000 is example of "enterprise" pricing: http://estore.gemini-systems.com/ibm/software-license/rational-testing-software/software-change-and-configuration-management/rational-clearcase-multisite/ http://estore.gemini-systems.com/ibm/software-license/ration... (Most college students would probably just use Git/Github instead of IBM Clearcase.)
wolfgke 10y ago
> Do students need enterprise Java IDEs (and IDEs for other languages designed by enterpirse Java developers)? Yes, there was a software project that we as students built with Java EE (we used Eclipse at that time) - we had to build on legacy code that another student wrote for his diploma thesis in Java EE. This is surely not typical, but sometimes it happens. I also like Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise, which one can get by the Dreamspark Premium program (I use it mostly for C++ and C# development), though there are many features that were once Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate only that are now also included in the Professional/Community Edition, too (for example Static Code Analysis in C++). So the difference is much smaller than in earlier times, but some testing tools, which I use, (in particular Code Coverage) are still Enterprise only: > https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/
pmontra 10y ago
For Java yes, but learn first javac and the command line tools. Then you understand why it's unbearable developing non trivial programs without an IDE. Too much time wasted. For Node, Python and Ruby you can do without an IDE.
- wcummings 10y ago
  You could still use maven w/o an IDE, it's really not that bad.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    It's mainly for compiling automatically when the code changes and for hot reloading. It's important for working with web apps. For desktop maybe not but it's been maybe 10 years since I built a desktop Java application.
    - paulmd 10y ago
      Maven is actually very important since it is a "generic" project format that all IDEs understand, it handles dependency management/downloading, etc. Ant and Gradle are nowhere near as useful since they are not a format an IDE can understand natively. They are a build script, not a project file, so you need to keep another project file in sync for each client you're using. You don't even necessarily need to be building a Java target for Maven to be useful. It's also a common way to build continuous-integration build scripts for things like Docker packages, database artifacts, etc.
gravypod 10y ago
Do students of carpentry need an "enterprise-grade" hammer with nails? Yes. You need to practice to become your most productive self. If you aren't productive you aren't going to find someone who will hire you.

kyriakos 10y ago

PHPStorm is one of the best things that ever happened to PHP. Not sure if they still do but JetBrains used to offer its IDEs for free to open source developers.

hulahoof 10y ago
I just checked, they still do for core members of open source projects: https://www.jetbrains.com/buy/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/buy/opensource/
- chx 10y ago
  I qualify for open source PHPStorm three times at least (Drupal 7, Drupal 8, PHP documentation) and yet, I love PHPStorm enough to buy it :)
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    Indeed it's one of those applications that are constantly updated adding features we need before we realise we did. Well worth it.
toxican 10y ago
I'm not a fan of subscription-based models for software, but PHPStorm is good enough for me to ignore that. Plus it gets cheaper yearly for the first 3 years.
- nolok 10y ago
  I agree and I was a bit disappointed at first being a long time customer, but they addressed that with the perpetual license. Also, for long term customer like me, it ended up costing less (I also got one year free when renewing, although I think that was a limited offer).
  - toxican 10y ago
    It left me kicking myself for not buying PHPStorm sooner so I could've gotten in on the perpetual license pricing. But oh well! It paid for itself pretty quickly, so I can't complain!

hulahoof 10y ago

Jetbrains are my IDE of choice, I started with phpStorm when I was doing webdev and have used most flavours during my studies - I recommend anyone studying to give this offer a try it is incredible value. Edit: I'd like to add all that's needed to get the student licence is a valid university email, at least for myself.

haffla 10y ago

Since at least two years ago I'm doing exactly that. Sorry that you only found out now ;D

infinity0 10y ago

they're IDE's what?

sofaofthedamned 10y ago
'Their', surely?
- jessaustin 10y ago
  The plural possessive still doesn't match the singular verb. "JetBrains" simply won't parse as a singular noun, so "offers" should be "offer".

0xCMP 10y ago

That also includes Reshaper, PyCharm, Webstorm, and CLion. These tools are awesome for students. Somewhere else mentioned if students really need these kinds of tools? To write code? Probably not, it's better if they spent the time to use Vim/Emacs or just got going with Atom/VSCode/Sublime. But none of those editors support the ease of clicking on something and seeing what that is. A class, a function, etc. Jetbrain's support for this in any language they support is probably the best anywhere and the editor itself is damn good. I try my very best to get rid of it and I always find myself coming back. Rarely can anything match it's features which once you learn how to use them you'll often need on a day to day basis.

spapas82 10y ago
For Java I'd say yes, students do need an IDE (or to be more specific their life would be very difficult without an IDE). It is really difficult to write java, even trivial programs without an IDE (because of Java's long package and class names). Since IntelliJ Studio is the defacto standard in Java IDEs (having surpassed Eclipse and Netbeans) I think that it is really great for students to be able use that IDE for their student projects. Of course the usage of the IDE must not prevent then from familiaring themselves with classpaths and compiling a Java program with more than one packages through the command line!
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  I mostly do Python and Node (usually all in PyCharm), but I agree for Java it's nice to have an editor.
- triplebit 10y ago
  > Since IntelliJ Studio is the defacto standard in Java IDEs (having surpassed Eclipse and Netbeans) Incorrect. Eclipse remains superior and is in far greater use across the world and the enterprise landscape.
  - AnthonBerg 10y ago
    Having also used Eclipse, I strongly disagree about its superiority; If it is popular, then I believe that is explained by its price and the self-sustaining property of ubiquity. I myself found Eclipse cumbersome and lacking in capacity. I do respect others' preference for it, but it cannot be said to be objectively superior.

Zekio 10y ago

IntelliJ IDE support for hi-dpi displays is great compared to netbeans.

joelthelion 10y ago

Learn open source tools, you'll be able to use them freely your entire life. These tools may be shinier, but they offer no real productivity gains in the long run.

viewer5 10y ago
Any recommendations to stand in for these?
- iNate2000 10y ago
  Ugly Eclipse keeps pulling me away from shiny IntelliJ. I've been switching to Java from C# for the last year or so. At my company, the Java developers that I most admire use Eclipse. Coming from Visual Studio, the weirdest thing about Eclipse was having multiple projects loaded in the same Eclipse instance. But as I get used to it, switching back to IntelliJ confuses me. I get lost with the multiple instances.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    The huge advantage with using multiple projects at the same time is you can trivially factor out mutual pieces of code and include them as libraries. It's a really important thing for extremely integrated large projects that have big overarching goals. For instance the game I'm writing as a server and a client. The idea of the networking components are abstracted away from the server and client. They include a library all together that handles everything. They don't need their own implementations and I don't need to switch back and forth in the IDEs to get to the right projects, start them, compile the library project, and go back to each sub-project and include it. It's so much nicer when working on client-server architectures. That's why I love eclipse
mgkimsal 10y ago
"but they offer no real productivity gains in the long run." I guess if you define 'long run' however you want... sure. Your point may stand. For almost everyone I know, JetBrains tools have delivered a massive, measurable amount of productivity gain, compared to any other tools they were using (commercial or free). "no real productivity gain" is highly subjective, and doesn't come close to matching the experience of most of the developers I know in their day to day work.

douche 10y ago

When I was in college, Microsoft had DreamSpark, which was a similar kind of thing (use your school email, get a bunch of free licenses to VS, SQL Server, etc). I don't know if they still do it, but especially in those days, it was great, because the free Express editions hadn't quite come out yet, and when they did, they were pretty gimped. Using a real version of Visual C++ was head and shoulders better than trying to fight with Eclipse, or CodeBlocks, or DevC++ in those days.

provemewrong 10y ago
They still do, I ued it to grab Windows 8 and 10, Visual Studio, Access and Visio. They rebranded it as Microsoft Imagine like a month ago though.

oliwarner 10y ago

Always very wary about suggesting people cut their teeth in the warm embrace of a IDE. It's often unrealistic. If it's the industry standard —like it was and probably still is completely normal to use VS.NET for .NET development— that might be okay but reducing exposure to things that the rest of your industry like a makefile or [gp]db, Maven/Gradle/Ant, or whatever... It's a real disservice to your students. If you're an educator and you want your students to get a job, make sure you're teaching the stuff we're actually using.

jsight 10y ago
I'm not sure that I get your point. Is there anything about using an IDE that keeps you from learning a build system? Although I do think it is unfortunately that a lot of CS courses pay little attention to build tools.
- oliwarner 10y ago
  There's nothing stopping you learning other stuff but I've found from both personal experience and dealing with new hires, people like to stick with what they learnt on. My experience is green graduates who grew up on IDEs struggle —for much longer than you'd expect— to get on with command line scripting and tools. They avoid a lot of very necessary experience when you have an IDE do everything. I'll stop well short of saying "real programmers only use VIM" but experience is everything, especially when differentiating juniors. Learning how to do everything with one IDE is a great way to get very little real-world experience.
  - jsight 10y ago
    That is a fair point, although my experience was that the IDE didn't matter much. Most of my fellow students didn't learn build systems regardless of whether they worked in the popular IDE at the time or just a text editor. I would hope that build systems would be taught regardless of the IDE.

triplebit 10y ago

Eclipse is also free and it's better.

what_ever 10y ago
I don't know about Eclipse being better. I switched to IntelliJ two years ago and I love it. I find it much better, faster and less buggy compared to Eclipse.
- gravypod 10y ago
  It depends on what you are using it for. IntellJ's maven integration is to die for. Eclipse has a better auto-completion engine. IntellJ is far less resource intensive but eclipse has some features (mutli-projects in one 'solution') that IntellJ won't add.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

At this point, the only major tech company whose products/services I gladly pay for is JetBrains. I wish them all the very best.

Roboprog 10y ago
They seem to have become what Borland should have.
- vintagedave 10y ago
  Embarcadero has those tools now, and those tools are very alive and kicking. Have you looked at them recently? (Except JBuilder, the Java IDE. Did you use it back in the day? What did you think of it?)
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    I haven't used Borland's stuff (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, TP-Windows, Debugger) since the early 90s. I bought a copy of Delphi around 96, but never really used it, as my late 90s job was more off in the unix side of things by then (Linux at home, but IRIX/AIX at work). No employer wants Borland's languages now. I suspect Kotlin will suffer the same fate. When I first started doing ANSI C work in the early 90s (several platforms, including non POSIX), it was helpful to be able to use Turbo C[++] / Turbo Debugger to work on an otherwise standardized language. That seems to be what JetBrains is doing best, now.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    I have not used Embarcadero's Delphi, just their database client. I have used Free Pascal, though. Interesting, but no demand for it :-( The whole 90s C/C++ thing was such a debacle. Running C for app work in the internet era reminded me of "Hunt for Red October" - "Next, he'll be removing the safeties from his torpedos" - "you arrogant ass, now you have killed us!". Widespread internet adoption was the "extinction level event" for C/C++ apps. (along with faster processors and garbage collection) Anyway, if more companies had used an Algol descended language that actually did bounds checking, and made less use of points constantly, the crisis that forced Java adoption could have been avoided.

calebsurfs 10y ago

I've been using pyCharm for the last 2 years and its code completion has helped me code and learn at a much faster pace than other editors. It offers code suggestions for any module that has been imported in addition to everything in the current script. Sublime and vim's code completion seem very primitive in comparison. That said, I usually use the free Community Edition because it loads faster.

junnan 10y ago
Emacs's elpy package is also great at auto-complete. I haven't used PyCharm myself but Emacs is more than enough. Also, most of my other programming are done in Emacs.

user5994461 10y ago

> all you need is a valid ISIC card. Too bad for non American non UK students.

Symbiote 10y ago
The card is available in over 130 countries, according to the website.

novaleaf 10y ago

Resharper is great, totally awesome features for C#... unless you have a large professional project. The performance tanks and features become unreliable the larger the project gets. This has been a problem with every resharper version since 5.x

LeanderK 10y ago

I am currently a CS Student and use a lot of the tools from jet brains. It's awesome that they are free! To give a bit of an perspective/motivation: They make it really easy to try something out. You can click things, visualise things and get guided by the IDE, then they scale with your skill until you never click things and only use the shortcuts. There is a plugin for nearly everything and the documentation (NOT the openapi-doc, thats horrible or nonexistent) is great. I would not want to teach an freshmen (is this correct? first year university?) javascript with vim/emacs.

SmooL 10y ago

One thing I love about the jetbrains suite is that the keyboard shortcuts remain mostly the same across all of them - whether I'm coding python in PyCharm or javascript in Webstorm, I can use the same keyboard shortcuts.