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Since the advent of LSP, I think the value proposition of a full featured IDE has been greatly diminished. For example, I used to use Intellij for Scala but re

by smabie 6y ago

Since the advent of LSP, I think the value proposition of a full featured IDE has been greatly diminished. For example, I used to use Intellij for Scala but recently switched to Emacs+Metals and haven't really missed anything. In fact, it's probably an even better editing experience. Intellij still has better refactoring (though I don't use it much), and the integrated debugger and database viewer are really nice. I've found myself using Emacs and only switching to Intellij for the aforementioned specialized tasks. 5 years ago you would have been crazy not using an IDE for JVM work but this is no longer the case. LSP is such a wonderful technology and has empowered the creation of new programming languages like never before. It's truly remarkable. If I was Intellij, I would be a little worried about my future market share. They simply can't provide the same value as before, and I'm not sure how they intend to change that.

jolux 6y ago
I wish I had had your luck with language servers. They are fantastic when they work but in my experience configuring them is finicky and difficult, particularly with Emacs. I have also run into problems where the server crashes and does not restart itself, so the IDE functionality in my editor will just silently break and I have to go fix it. JetBrains still dominates the market for IDEs that work out of the box, and I still don't know of any LSPs that can even remotely compete with the sophistication of their static analysis tools and such.
noisy_boy 6y ago
IntelliJ's own checking has had its issues (e.g. this bug https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust/issues/5807 https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust/issues/5807). However, my experience with rls/rust-analyzer with VSCode hasn't been great either. Red squiggly lines that persist even if the syntax is correct - I have to erase and type the same thing to trigger refreshed checking which is very annoying and counter-productive. Though it is possible that this is more of an integration issue considering I haven't had similar problems with Typescript on VSCode - the checking was flawless (I think typescript checking also uses a language server).
yawaramin 6y ago
Does Metals have a feature to add parameter names at method callsites? I use that IntelliJ feature of the Scala plugin all the time, it's such a lifesaver.

by smabie 6y ago

jolux 6y ago

I wish I had had your luck with language servers. They are fantastic when they work but in my experience configuring them is finicky and difficult, particularly with Emacs. I have also run into problems where the server crashes and does not restart itself, so the IDE functionality in my editor will just silently break and I have to go fix it. JetBrains still dominates the market for IDEs that work out of the box, and I still don't know of any LSPs that can even remotely compete with the sophistication of their static analysis tools and such.

noisy_boy 6y ago

IntelliJ's own checking has had its issues (e.g. this bug https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust/issues/5807 https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust/issues/5807). However, my experience with rls/rust-analyzer with VSCode hasn't been great either. Red squiggly lines that persist even if the syntax is correct - I have to erase and type the same thing to trigger refreshed checking which is very annoying and counter-productive. Though it is possible that this is more of an integration issue considering I haven't had similar problems with Typescript on VSCode - the checking was flawless (I think typescript checking also uses a language server).

yawaramin 6y ago

Does Metals have a feature to add parameter names at method callsites? I use that IntelliJ feature of the Scala plugin all the time, it's such a lifesaver.