The articles talks about editors, but VS Code is mainly an IDE. Its predecessors were in order Emacs + single-language IDEs + proprietary IDEs, then Eclipse a

The articles talks about editors, but VS Code is mainly an IDE. Its predecessors were in order Emacs + single-language IDEs + proprietary IDEs, then Eclipse and finally IntelliJ IDEA CE. Emacs lost because it failed to update to reasonable modern conventions and because it used a niche programming language. Eclipse lost because they released a bunch of different bundles instead of a single install (apparently because the contributing companies saw Eclipse as a common base for their proprietary IDEs), it was slow for the time, and had a bunch of unnecessary UI complexity (e.g. it had an unnecessary perspective system that would change the IDE layout depending on language, meaning that you couldn't just customize the IDE and have it apply for all languages, but had to customize each perspective). IntelliJ IDEA lost because only the core was open source and major parts were proprietary, resulting in reduced 3rd party confidence. VS Code is winning because they have a major company backing it that mostly doesn't seek to make proprietary IDEs with it except for minor proprietary aspects, uses the most popular language for extensions, avoids unnecessary UI complexity and is also fast and technically good.