11 ms·

What an absolutely tone deaf thing to say. "It can't be our product that's using out dated philosophies. It's the users that don't know how to use it properly"

realusername 6y ago
Yeah, they just don't get it, they have stayed for so long in the enterprise java world that they can't comprehend that everybody else moved on from those bloated IDEs. On my case if I had a choice even between Notepad++ and IntelliJ (to pick an extreme example), I would still use Notepad++. VScode is a very nice middle ground where the defaults make sense and you can get powerful extensions for everything else you want, there's a reason it's so popular.
- rob74 6y ago
  Am I the only one who finds it a little bit ironic to call IntelliJ bloated, and then recommend VS Code, which may not be that "bloated" feature-wise, but is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? A VS Code-like product using the Sublime Text engine would be the ideal development tool for me. As long as that's not available, I'm using PHPStorm at work (my company is paying for it) and VS Code for my private projects in Go - still haven't tried out Goland, IntelliJ's Go IDE, but so far I'm happy with VS Code.
  - realusername 6y ago
    I'm well aware that VSCode as a tech product is also full of bloat internally, the difference is that this bloat is mostly hidden to the user. What they have going for them is that it's a well designed text editor with sensible defaults in the first place, it "just works" and it's simple, that's also why it's so popular. You can add as much (or as little) as you want on top of it.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      The UI is also a lot cleaner. There are only a couple of icons and each of them does something I use regularly. Jetbrains products have 300 icons and I use about 5 of them. Once I worked out I could do everything I use rubymine for in vscode with plugins I stopped paying that license fee.
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    > VS Code ... is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? You say that, but IntelliJ is not exactly slouching on resource usage. I see far lower memory usage in VS Code than I do IntelliJ opening the same projects.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    No, there is no irony there. HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. I don't know what Electron does under similar circumstances because I've never tried to measure it, but I know that I regularly see Electron apps using less than 70MB, so we can estimate an upper bound on Electron's typical contribution to bloat as being no more than ~30% of Java's. For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB. I doubt that much of that difference is actually attributable to using a browser rendering engine for GUI layout. In fact, I'm guessing that Chromium's net impact on the situation falls below the noise threshold of this comparison. So, yeah, not worried about it. FWIW, vscode also started up quite a bit faster, and I experience less keyboard lag when using it. And, if we're looking for mature and full-featred cross-platform GUI toolkits, that's about it for your options. Yes, there's QT, but, with a sticker price of $4000/developer/year, it's hard to criticize people for not choosing it. And there's GTK+, which is fine, I suppose, but not exactly everyone's cup of tea. Long story short: This Electron-flaming meme is getting old. If you don't like JavaScript, just come out and say it. If you don't like how Chromium is eating the world, that's a fair point, too. But stop scapegoating Electron for things like how Slack's desktop app used to leak memory at an astonishing rate. That was always the app developer's fault, not Electron's.
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      QT is free if you’re OK linking it as LGPL.
    - vips7L 6y ago
      > HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. This is much lower in newer jdk's [0]. > For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB I believe this to just be intellij bloat and not JVM because it just does too much. I run VSCode with the Java plugins and ZGC (read: eclipse language server, which is all jvm) and the language server only ends up using around 250mb of ram. [0] https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.html https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.ht...
  - CodeGlitch 6y ago
    > but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is something you want to do in a text-editor is it not? Why not use the best tool for the job? You're probably right that something like Sublime Text is faster - but that's a massive undertaking that would take a lot of engineering to get right.
    - bananaface 6y ago
      The job of a browser is to render a wide range of UI specifications reliably and support a collection of broken but grandfathered web languages, not to render them quickly. Speed is nice, but it comes after those concerns. The point of Electron is to allow people to develop UIs quickly, leveraging their experience with the web. Electron is extremely bloated & slow. To some degree it has to be. If browsers were about speed, they wouldn't interpret Javascript. I'd argue they'd probably force the UI to be specified in a form that explicitly disallows inefficiencies and probably isn't turing complete. I'd argue a domain-specific solution for rendering highlighted code specifically could be a lot faster than a browser, like multiple orders of magnitude. We know that's the case by virtue of the fact we could even do it at all in the 80s.
- nullsense 6y ago
  How on earth would you navigate any reasonably sized Java or .NET project in Notepad++? That would be so far beyond impractical you wouldn't last an afternoon.
adrian17 6y ago
In good faith, I read it as "users don't even know what they're missing out on". To be honest, I feel like some of the comments here are at least partially proving them right in this regard.
- djlewald 6y ago
  I feel like it's on the product to make those benefits apparent and easy to use. They're selling me (the user) not the other way around. The message comes off very privileged IMO.
- brlewis 6y ago
  The article now has an update that confirms your reading: I can see that by using an abridged and edited version of my analysis of the data for this blog post that I’ve unintentionally spread confusion. I’d like to clarify the intention behind my comments on developers and IDEs. For me, if developers don’t understand what IntelliJ IDEA gives them as a fully-featured IDE, that’s a failure on my part, since it has been my job for six years to educate developers on what an IDE (specifically IntelliJ IDEA) can do for you. I feel very strongly that one should never blame users, or prospective users, for failing to understand a product. My personal viewpoint on IDEs for Java developers comes from having been a Java developer for 20+ years, working on production Java projects large and small. I can’t imagine trying to create a complex enterprise application without the considerable help you get from an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA. I have also seen lots of developers using VSCode and I completely see the use cases that code editors cover well. There’s always room for more than one tool in your toolkit, and understanding what a tool does well helps us pick the right one for the right job.
- lyjackal 6y ago
  Well, seems heavy handed either way to give vscode such attention when vscode was only 4% of respondants. Seems reasonable that you wouldn't want a full fledged IDE in certain cases. For example, a small simple project, or if you're mainly a frontend dev who just needs to add a small API
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
tshanmu 6y ago
"Clearly, you are holding the phone incorrectly"
tootie 6y ago
I'm admittedly an IntelliJ fanboy but I also make extensive use of VS Code and I think JetBrains are 100% correct. The kind of extra features you get from a really good IDE are so easily worth it if you spend even a small amount of time learning how. You may need to invest an hour or two getting it to understand your project setup but then you have real-time debugging, refactoring, granular test running (and debugging) right away. I think the move away from IDEs is coupled to the move away from strict typing (which I also hate) because IDEs lose value when they can't reliably understand your code.
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  Yes but they are clearly missing something and that's simplicity. I use goland because ei get go refractor and move utilities but I get annoyed when I feel like I have to fight it to do simple things. I think the default keyboard shortcuts between the two products show a lot.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Vscode is used by by many Rust and Go developers. I would wager to say it’s the most popular IDE for those languages.
  - dathanb82 6y ago
    I wonder how much of that is just the lack of really good IDE tooling for Rust? GoLand is pretty good, so I don’t know if similar question applies to Go.
    - dpc_pw 6y ago
      Java pretty much requires an IDE because it's verbose, bloated, everything is inconvenient without IDE assistance and it's easy to create bugs. Something as simple as opening a file of code requires IDE, because everything is hidden behind `./src/main/java/com/whatever` nonsense. The language was designed for IDE. In Rust there is hardly any need for IDE (or a debugger), as long as your text editor has LSP support. Hell, even without LSP support it feels quite OK to write Rust code. I use Intellij for Java, and Kakoune for Rust, and I really dislike working with Java. The fancy refactoring features don't make up for how verbose, clunky and inexpressive Java is. The Rust way is to have great modular and reusable tooling for everything. Even stuff like complex refactoring can be achieved without an IDE with something like https://github.com/google/rerast https://github.com/google/rerast
missosoup 6y ago
As someone who used to heavily use intellij and visual studio, and briefly defended them when I transitioned to a shop that was full of vim/emacs hipsters, I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I recall the times when I was using them. The way of the future is definitely lightweight code editors loaded with as much or little customisation as the user desires. Monolothic IDEs are long dead outside of the Enterprise™© world. Funnily enough, I also found myself using Java and .net less and less. I never had much love for Java, but C# was an amazing language that somehow got gobbled up by the Enterprise black hole and it's a huge shame.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Midular, sure, but lightweight? Once you've loaded VsCode with all the plugins, It's actually slower than a proper IDE.
  - neurotrace 6y ago
    I have a pretty beefy VS Code configuration and it still launches 4x-5x faster than Visual Studio
    - g_b 6y ago
      What does your typical work day look like? Do you work on multiple things that don't require coding? Why does launch-time matter at all?
      - nullsense 6y ago
        This is the central question in my mind too. In a typical work day I might launch a project once. Heck, I might only launch it once a week to be honest. I spend all day navigating and reasoning about the codebase I'm working in, so I need strong tools that aide me in that. That's where VSCode doesn't hold a candle to Rider IME. So Rider is my daily driver at work. The responses from some devs leave me wondering what their env/projects/work day actually look like and how does their tooling actually work for them in practice. It would be incredibly interesting to see the landscape of different work envs and tooling and do a comparison of what happens in each given env when you swap out the tooling.

realusername 6y ago

Yeah, they just don't get it, they have stayed for so long in the enterprise java world that they can't comprehend that everybody else moved on from those bloated IDEs. On my case if I had a choice even between Notepad++ and IntelliJ (to pick an extreme example), I would still use Notepad++. VScode is a very nice middle ground where the defaults make sense and you can get powerful extensions for everything else you want, there's a reason it's so popular.

rob74 6y ago
Am I the only one who finds it a little bit ironic to call IntelliJ bloated, and then recommend VS Code, which may not be that "bloated" feature-wise, but is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? A VS Code-like product using the Sublime Text engine would be the ideal development tool for me. As long as that's not available, I'm using PHPStorm at work (my company is paying for it) and VS Code for my private projects in Go - still haven't tried out Goland, IntelliJ's Go IDE, but so far I'm happy with VS Code.
- realusername 6y ago
  I'm well aware that VSCode as a tech product is also full of bloat internally, the difference is that this bloat is mostly hidden to the user. What they have going for them is that it's a well designed text editor with sensible defaults in the first place, it "just works" and it's simple, that's also why it's so popular. You can add as much (or as little) as you want on top of it.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    The UI is also a lot cleaner. There are only a couple of icons and each of them does something I use regularly. Jetbrains products have 300 icons and I use about 5 of them. Once I worked out I could do everything I use rubymine for in vscode with plugins I stopped paying that license fee.
- jdmichal 6y ago
  > VS Code ... is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? You say that, but IntelliJ is not exactly slouching on resource usage. I see far lower memory usage in VS Code than I do IntelliJ opening the same projects.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  No, there is no irony there. HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. I don't know what Electron does under similar circumstances because I've never tried to measure it, but I know that I regularly see Electron apps using less than 70MB, so we can estimate an upper bound on Electron's typical contribution to bloat as being no more than ~30% of Java's. For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB. I doubt that much of that difference is actually attributable to using a browser rendering engine for GUI layout. In fact, I'm guessing that Chromium's net impact on the situation falls below the noise threshold of this comparison. So, yeah, not worried about it. FWIW, vscode also started up quite a bit faster, and I experience less keyboard lag when using it. And, if we're looking for mature and full-featred cross-platform GUI toolkits, that's about it for your options. Yes, there's QT, but, with a sticker price of $4000/developer/year, it's hard to criticize people for not choosing it. And there's GTK+, which is fine, I suppose, but not exactly everyone's cup of tea. Long story short: This Electron-flaming meme is getting old. If you don't like JavaScript, just come out and say it. If you don't like how Chromium is eating the world, that's a fair point, too. But stop scapegoating Electron for things like how Slack's desktop app used to leak memory at an astonishing rate. That was always the app developer's fault, not Electron's.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    QT is free if you’re OK linking it as LGPL.
  - vips7L 6y ago
    > HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. This is much lower in newer jdk's [0]. > For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB I believe this to just be intellij bloat and not JVM because it just does too much. I run VSCode with the Java plugins and ZGC (read: eclipse language server, which is all jvm) and the language server only ends up using around 250mb of ram. [0] https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.html https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.ht...
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  > but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is something you want to do in a text-editor is it not? Why not use the best tool for the job? You're probably right that something like Sublime Text is faster - but that's a massive undertaking that would take a lot of engineering to get right.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    The job of a browser is to render a wide range of UI specifications reliably and support a collection of broken but grandfathered web languages, not to render them quickly. Speed is nice, but it comes after those concerns. The point of Electron is to allow people to develop UIs quickly, leveraging their experience with the web. Electron is extremely bloated & slow. To some degree it has to be. If browsers were about speed, they wouldn't interpret Javascript. I'd argue they'd probably force the UI to be specified in a form that explicitly disallows inefficiencies and probably isn't turing complete. I'd argue a domain-specific solution for rendering highlighted code specifically could be a lot faster than a browser, like multiple orders of magnitude. We know that's the case by virtue of the fact we could even do it at all in the 80s.
nullsense 6y ago
How on earth would you navigate any reasonably sized Java or .NET project in Notepad++? That would be so far beyond impractical you wouldn't last an afternoon.

adrian17 6y ago

In good faith, I read it as "users don't even know what they're missing out on". To be honest, I feel like some of the comments here are at least partially proving them right in this regard.

djlewald 6y ago
I feel like it's on the product to make those benefits apparent and easy to use. They're selling me (the user) not the other way around. The message comes off very privileged IMO.
brlewis 6y ago
The article now has an update that confirms your reading: I can see that by using an abridged and edited version of my analysis of the data for this blog post that I’ve unintentionally spread confusion. I’d like to clarify the intention behind my comments on developers and IDEs. For me, if developers don’t understand what IntelliJ IDEA gives them as a fully-featured IDE, that’s a failure on my part, since it has been my job for six years to educate developers on what an IDE (specifically IntelliJ IDEA) can do for you. I feel very strongly that one should never blame users, or prospective users, for failing to understand a product. My personal viewpoint on IDEs for Java developers comes from having been a Java developer for 20+ years, working on production Java projects large and small. I can’t imagine trying to create a complex enterprise application without the considerable help you get from an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA. I have also seen lots of developers using VSCode and I completely see the use cases that code editors cover well. There’s always room for more than one tool in your toolkit, and understanding what a tool does well helps us pick the right one for the right job.
lyjackal 6y ago
Well, seems heavy handed either way to give vscode such attention when vscode was only 4% of respondants. Seems reasonable that you wouldn't want a full fledged IDE in certain cases. For example, a small simple project, or if you're mainly a frontend dev who just needs to add a small API
- Godel_unicode 6y ago

tshanmu 6y ago

"Clearly, you are holding the phone incorrectly"

tootie 6y ago

I'm admittedly an IntelliJ fanboy but I also make extensive use of VS Code and I think JetBrains are 100% correct. The kind of extra features you get from a really good IDE are so easily worth it if you spend even a small amount of time learning how. You may need to invest an hour or two getting it to understand your project setup but then you have real-time debugging, refactoring, granular test running (and debugging) right away. I think the move away from IDEs is coupled to the move away from strict typing (which I also hate) because IDEs lose value when they can't reliably understand your code.

defnotashton2 6y ago
Yes but they are clearly missing something and that's simplicity. I use goland because ei get go refractor and move utilities but I get annoyed when I feel like I have to fight it to do simple things. I think the default keyboard shortcuts between the two products show a lot.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Vscode is used by by many Rust and Go developers. I would wager to say it’s the most popular IDE for those languages.
- dathanb82 6y ago
  I wonder how much of that is just the lack of really good IDE tooling for Rust? GoLand is pretty good, so I don’t know if similar question applies to Go.
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    Java pretty much requires an IDE because it's verbose, bloated, everything is inconvenient without IDE assistance and it's easy to create bugs. Something as simple as opening a file of code requires IDE, because everything is hidden behind `./src/main/java/com/whatever` nonsense. The language was designed for IDE. In Rust there is hardly any need for IDE (or a debugger), as long as your text editor has LSP support. Hell, even without LSP support it feels quite OK to write Rust code. I use Intellij for Java, and Kakoune for Rust, and I really dislike working with Java. The fancy refactoring features don't make up for how verbose, clunky and inexpressive Java is. The Rust way is to have great modular and reusable tooling for everything. Even stuff like complex refactoring can be achieved without an IDE with something like https://github.com/google/rerast https://github.com/google/rerast

missosoup 6y ago

As someone who used to heavily use intellij and visual studio, and briefly defended them when I transitioned to a shop that was full of vim/emacs hipsters, I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I recall the times when I was using them. The way of the future is definitely lightweight code editors loaded with as much or little customisation as the user desires. Monolothic IDEs are long dead outside of the Enterprise™© world. Funnily enough, I also found myself using Java and .net less and less. I never had much love for Java, but C# was an amazing language that somehow got gobbled up by the Enterprise black hole and it's a huge shame.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Midular, sure, but lightweight? Once you've loaded VsCode with all the plugins, It's actually slower than a proper IDE.
- neurotrace 6y ago
  I have a pretty beefy VS Code configuration and it still launches 4x-5x faster than Visual Studio
  - g_b 6y ago
    What does your typical work day look like? Do you work on multiple things that don't require coding? Why does launch-time matter at all?
    - nullsense 6y ago
      This is the central question in my mind too. In a typical work day I might launch a project once. Heck, I might only launch it once a week to be honest. I spend all day navigating and reasoning about the codebase I'm working in, so I need strong tools that aide me in that. That's where VSCode doesn't hold a candle to Rider IME. So Rider is my daily driver at work. The responses from some devs leave me wondering what their env/projects/work day actually look like and how does their tooling actually work for them in practice. It would be incredibly interesting to see the landscape of different work envs and tooling and do a comparison of what happens in each given env when you swap out the tooling.