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-- JetBrains have existed since 2000 & till recently they didn't cross my radar - what happened in the last year that I see them trending all over the Dev-o-sph

-- JetBrains have existed since 2000 & till recently they didn't cross my radar - what happened in the last year that I see them trending all over the Dev-o-sphere? Seems they've really hit their stride - is there a particular product folks have adopted or their marketing has improved or....? --

medwards666 4y ago
Not sure, but they've really been active the last couple of years in language training and collaborative development. Plus, I happen to think their IDEs are probably the best out there (despite their relative complexity). Been a happy user of their IDE suite now for many years, and IMHO, nothing else comes even close.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
They make software IDEs IntelliJ Ultimate is widely considered one of the best for Java development (Android Studio is a fork of the open source branch).
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I had to work on a Java-based web application for a brief-but-terrible moment, and I am very happy to have spent the money out of my own pocket for IntelliJ. I think using Java for web apps is a Bad Idea, but IntelliJ, at least, made it tolerable to write code for.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Java is great for web apps. Libraries for everything, quite fast if you keep services running (as opposed to loading them on demand) and has been quite successful in the sphere for quite some time. It's just not everyone's cup of tea. I think the more you like dynamic languages or functional the more you're going to absolutely hate java.
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      Java's great, but if we're building a WEB app, I like a language that can also generate the view. In Java land, everyone is now relying on some Javascript library, and I hate having to make 2 compilers agree at the edges where they touch.
      - eastbound 4y ago
        The only edge they touch is the REST API. Granted, it’s a bit annoying to map types in Java and JS, but it’s easy through Swagger or Typescript.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        I agree with that wholeheartedly, but there is a solution: there is teavm which can compile byte code to js (and wasm), or google’s closure compiler. There used to be also GWT and nowadays Vaadin I believe to do frontend completely, but I honestly think that a shared business lib with native frontend for each platform is the best way forward.
- mekster 4y ago
  Not just Java. It's best for any languages they support. The only thing is that it's not lightweight but hopefully they'll get Fleet right.
thomascgalvin 4y ago
They have three major products that are wildly popular: - IntelliJ is the most popular IDE for JVM-based languages, and provides a framework for other IDEs (like PyCharm, GoLand, etc) - Kotlin is the standard language for Android development, and is now a first-class citizen in Spring Boot - Jetpack promises cross-platform UI development that works better than anything since Electron. It remains to be seen if that promise pays off, but it has people excited.
StevePerkins 4y ago
I don't know what tech stack you work in primarily. But IntelliJ basically ate the Java world around 12 years ago, I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user since 2010. ReSharper has been a standard in the .NET world for well over a decade. If you're a C# developer and you don't use it, then you are at least familiar with it. In the Python world, I believe that PyCharm has somewhere between 1/3 and 50% market share. That and VS Code are the two main games in town. I'm not as well connected to other ecosystems, but I believe that RubyMine and PhpStorm are very prominent in the Ruby and PHP worlds. I mean basically, in 2022 I would say that the vast majority of developers fall into one of 3 categories: * They use a Jetbrains product. * They use VS Code (I guess you can throw full-blown Visual Studio into this bucket as well). * They use a plain text editor, instead of an IDE or more IDE-like tool.
- AdamN 4y ago
  VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE and that's either a JetBrains product or Visual Studio (xcode for Apple).
  - bad_good_guy 4y ago
    This is unbelievably inaccurate.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE If you mean exclusive "VS Code users" then maybe. As an IDE user for one file type (in my case *.cs ) I still find VS code a very useful tool for any other file types. I can install linters and formatters for them, e.g. for yaml, json, xml, text etc. and VS code then makes a great editor, hits a good spot between "still fairly light and fast" and "has features". An IDE focuses on one task. VS code complements it by being a "swiss army knife"
    - usrusr 4y ago
chrsig 4y ago
Perhaps your sphere is expanding? They've been widely regarded as some of the industry's best IDE creators for many many years
Longhanks 4y ago
CLion is a solid Choice for some C and C++ workloads, not all of them. It’s pretty good at most tasks. Struggles with super large projects and exotic compilers/build systems, but mostly solid. Though if you’re accustomed to say visual studio, there’s few reasons to switch. It’s nice to have a enterprise-grade IDE on Linux, though. I personally love it.
- necubi 4y ago
  CLion is also a really good (imo the best) Rust IDE
stjohnswarts 4y ago
You must not be in the Java world? They have dominated the IDE there for quite a while.
krisgenre 4y ago
I switched to intelliJ 7 years ago after trying out Android Studio. I suppose this plus Kotlin is making people more aware of Jetbrains. Back then almost all beginner tutorials used to show Eclipse but that has changed gradually to intelliJ. In fact I can't remember seeing Eclipse in any recent programming videos, its just intelliJ and VSCode everywhere.
eweise 4y ago
I think they hit their stride around 2005.
euos 4y ago
They are a Russian company with most engineers in Russia. There had been a strong records in Russian social networks of their engineers supporting Russian attacks on other countries (e.g. there was one engineer back in 2014 who moderated another forum and was banning Ukrainians and expressing glee at annexation of Crimea). They had been working hard to distance themselves from Russia. You may also notice similar spike in activity from Yandex, who had been publishing open-source project at elevated rate last half a year.
- atemerev 4y ago
  They are a Czech company with founders originally from Russia (but most of them moved to other countries long time ago). Their leadership do not support war in Ukraine and doing many things to help Ukrainians. As for the opinions of individual engineers — there are many engineers in, say, FAANG, and other companies who sadly expressed pro-Russian views in social media. I have seen them here on Hacker News.
  - maxdo 4y ago
    They are as Czech as google or apple a company from Ireland. they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia. Their presence in Russia is huge. Working with them is a potential risk.
    - atemerev 4y ago
      They are closing Russia’s offices right now and offering relocation packages to everyone still left there. It is somewhat hard to work with Russian security services after this statement: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
      - comonoid 4y ago
        My sources state that they have closed all Russia's offices and terminated contracts with everyone who haven't relocated. Update: technically, there are some corporate lawyers and accountants that are working on closing JetBrain's LLC in Russia. But we are talking about software engineers, aren't we?
zepearl 4y ago
Same here, I didn't really notice them a lot until recently. But then a few months ago I started learning Rust and ended up choosing CLion (with its Rust plugin), almost at the same time at the company I'm working for we started using IDEA (with its "Coldfusion" plugin). The products work, I don't have complains.
stephenhuey 4y ago
Around 2005 or so, I remember a programmer on another team at a bank telling me that IntelliJ was so much better than Eclipse. I've also written a lot of Ruby over the years, and at some point I was using TextMate because it was a supercharged text editor (not an IDE) that helped with some Ruby things, but eventually I switched to Rubymine which is made by JetBrains. It's not perfect, and I don't use a lot of the IDE, but considering Ruby is a dynamic language, Rubymine does a great job of helping me jump around large numbers of project files quickly to method definitions, etc. Occasionally I use it to go digging into the source of Ruby gems. Refactoring across the project works pretty well too which is harder to get right in a dynamic language. It saves me a lot of time.
kubav 4y ago
I think they lost/overgrown competition. Other IDEs started to loose development speed and newer programs like sublime, atom and vscode are not comparable (they are more like improved vim + plugins experience than heavyweight IDE). I have switched to clion from eclipse CDT in 2018 (because of missing support for newer C++ standards) and never looked back (tried vscode but its UI is not customizable at all). Later I have subscribed for all product pack as I have projects in multiple languages (personal license is quite cheap especially with discount for long term customers). The only think I hate about jetbrains IDEs is their licensing. It is not possible to have all features in one project: * idea ultimate has plugins for everything except native (support is limited without debuger etc.) * clion has plugins for native but limited plugins for everything else (pycharm community, limited JS support, no big data tools for kafka etc.) I work on python project with some parts being C++ modules and I have to switch between IDEs for one project to have all features.
mike_hearn 4y ago
They got a lot bigger. In 2015 they had ~600 employees. By 2020 that was 1500. Basically they were able to: a. Refactor features out of IntelliJ Ultimate into separate products, expanding their mindshare and market share e.g. database plugin -> DataGrip. b. Move their userbase to subscriptions -> much larger and more stable revenue stream. c. Google migrated from Eclipse to IntelliJ for their Android IDE. Then Kotlin blew up and became adopted as the official primary language on Android, which created a massive ecosystem and drives lots of users to use IntelliJ and then upgrade to Ultimate.
mekster 4y ago
I think you just didn't care to find alternatives to your environment nor read much of HN comments on programming editor topics. It's been about 5 years since I decided to switch to all products pack from PHPStorm which I used for a few years.

medwards666 4y ago

Not sure, but they've really been active the last couple of years in language training and collaborative development. Plus, I happen to think their IDEs are probably the best out there (despite their relative complexity). Been a happy user of their IDE suite now for many years, and IMHO, nothing else comes even close.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

They make software IDEs IntelliJ Ultimate is widely considered one of the best for Java development (Android Studio is a fork of the open source branch).

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
I had to work on a Java-based web application for a brief-but-terrible moment, and I am very happy to have spent the money out of my own pocket for IntelliJ. I think using Java for web apps is a Bad Idea, but IntelliJ, at least, made it tolerable to write code for.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Java is great for web apps. Libraries for everything, quite fast if you keep services running (as opposed to loading them on demand) and has been quite successful in the sphere for quite some time. It's just not everyone's cup of tea. I think the more you like dynamic languages or functional the more you're going to absolutely hate java.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    Java's great, but if we're building a WEB app, I like a language that can also generate the view. In Java land, everyone is now relying on some Javascript library, and I hate having to make 2 compilers agree at the edges where they touch.
    - eastbound 4y ago
      The only edge they touch is the REST API. Granted, it’s a bit annoying to map types in Java and JS, but it’s easy through Swagger or Typescript.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      I agree with that wholeheartedly, but there is a solution: there is teavm which can compile byte code to js (and wasm), or google’s closure compiler. There used to be also GWT and nowadays Vaadin I believe to do frontend completely, but I honestly think that a shared business lib with native frontend for each platform is the best way forward.
mekster 4y ago
Not just Java. It's best for any languages they support. The only thing is that it's not lightweight but hopefully they'll get Fleet right.

thomascgalvin 4y ago

They have three major products that are wildly popular: - IntelliJ is the most popular IDE for JVM-based languages, and provides a framework for other IDEs (like PyCharm, GoLand, etc) - Kotlin is the standard language for Android development, and is now a first-class citizen in Spring Boot - Jetpack promises cross-platform UI development that works better than anything since Electron. It remains to be seen if that promise pays off, but it has people excited.

StevePerkins 4y ago

I don't know what tech stack you work in primarily. But IntelliJ basically ate the Java world around 12 years ago, I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user since 2010. ReSharper has been a standard in the .NET world for well over a decade. If you're a C# developer and you don't use it, then you are at least familiar with it. In the Python world, I believe that PyCharm has somewhere between 1/3 and 50% market share. That and VS Code are the two main games in town. I'm not as well connected to other ecosystems, but I believe that RubyMine and PhpStorm are very prominent in the Ruby and PHP worlds. I mean basically, in 2022 I would say that the vast majority of developers fall into one of 3 categories: * They use a Jetbrains product. * They use VS Code (I guess you can throw full-blown Visual Studio into this bucket as well). * They use a plain text editor, instead of an IDE or more IDE-like tool.

AdamN 4y ago
VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE and that's either a JetBrains product or Visual Studio (xcode for Apple).
- bad_good_guy 4y ago
  This is unbelievably inaccurate.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE If you mean exclusive "VS Code users" then maybe. As an IDE user for one file type (in my case *.cs ) I still find VS code a very useful tool for any other file types. I can install linters and formatters for them, e.g. for yaml, json, xml, text etc. and VS code then makes a great editor, hits a good spot between "still fairly light and fast" and "has features". An IDE focuses on one task. VS code complements it by being a "swiss army knife"
  - usrusr 4y ago

chrsig 4y ago

Perhaps your sphere is expanding? They've been widely regarded as some of the industry's best IDE creators for many many years

Longhanks 4y ago

CLion is a solid Choice for some C and C++ workloads, not all of them. It’s pretty good at most tasks. Struggles with super large projects and exotic compilers/build systems, but mostly solid. Though if you’re accustomed to say visual studio, there’s few reasons to switch. It’s nice to have a enterprise-grade IDE on Linux, though. I personally love it.

necubi 4y ago
CLion is also a really good (imo the best) Rust IDE

stjohnswarts 4y ago

You must not be in the Java world? They have dominated the IDE there for quite a while.

krisgenre 4y ago

I switched to intelliJ 7 years ago after trying out Android Studio. I suppose this plus Kotlin is making people more aware of Jetbrains. Back then almost all beginner tutorials used to show Eclipse but that has changed gradually to intelliJ. In fact I can't remember seeing Eclipse in any recent programming videos, its just intelliJ and VSCode everywhere.

eweise 4y ago

I think they hit their stride around 2005.

euos 4y ago

They are a Russian company with most engineers in Russia. There had been a strong records in Russian social networks of their engineers supporting Russian attacks on other countries (e.g. there was one engineer back in 2014 who moderated another forum and was banning Ukrainians and expressing glee at annexation of Crimea). They had been working hard to distance themselves from Russia. You may also notice similar spike in activity from Yandex, who had been publishing open-source project at elevated rate last half a year.

atemerev 4y ago
They are a Czech company with founders originally from Russia (but most of them moved to other countries long time ago). Their leadership do not support war in Ukraine and doing many things to help Ukrainians. As for the opinions of individual engineers — there are many engineers in, say, FAANG, and other companies who sadly expressed pro-Russian views in social media. I have seen them here on Hacker News.
- maxdo 4y ago
  They are as Czech as google or apple a company from Ireland. they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia. Their presence in Russia is huge. Working with them is a potential risk.
  - atemerev 4y ago
    They are closing Russia’s offices right now and offering relocation packages to everyone still left there. It is somewhat hard to work with Russian security services after this statement: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
    - comonoid 4y ago
      My sources state that they have closed all Russia's offices and terminated contracts with everyone who haven't relocated. Update: technically, there are some corporate lawyers and accountants that are working on closing JetBrain's LLC in Russia. But we are talking about software engineers, aren't we?

zepearl 4y ago

Same here, I didn't really notice them a lot until recently. But then a few months ago I started learning Rust and ended up choosing CLion (with its Rust plugin), almost at the same time at the company I'm working for we started using IDEA (with its "Coldfusion" plugin). The products work, I don't have complains.

stephenhuey 4y ago

Around 2005 or so, I remember a programmer on another team at a bank telling me that IntelliJ was so much better than Eclipse. I've also written a lot of Ruby over the years, and at some point I was using TextMate because it was a supercharged text editor (not an IDE) that helped with some Ruby things, but eventually I switched to Rubymine which is made by JetBrains. It's not perfect, and I don't use a lot of the IDE, but considering Ruby is a dynamic language, Rubymine does a great job of helping me jump around large numbers of project files quickly to method definitions, etc. Occasionally I use it to go digging into the source of Ruby gems. Refactoring across the project works pretty well too which is harder to get right in a dynamic language. It saves me a lot of time.

kubav 4y ago

I think they lost/overgrown competition. Other IDEs started to loose development speed and newer programs like sublime, atom and vscode are not comparable (they are more like improved vim + plugins experience than heavyweight IDE). I have switched to clion from eclipse CDT in 2018 (because of missing support for newer C++ standards) and never looked back (tried vscode but its UI is not customizable at all). Later I have subscribed for all product pack as I have projects in multiple languages (personal license is quite cheap especially with discount for long term customers). The only think I hate about jetbrains IDEs is their licensing. It is not possible to have all features in one project: * idea ultimate has plugins for everything except native (support is limited without debuger etc.) * clion has plugins for native but limited plugins for everything else (pycharm community, limited JS support, no big data tools for kafka etc.) I work on python project with some parts being C++ modules and I have to switch between IDEs for one project to have all features.

mike_hearn 4y ago

They got a lot bigger. In 2015 they had ~600 employees. By 2020 that was 1500. Basically they were able to: a. Refactor features out of IntelliJ Ultimate into separate products, expanding their mindshare and market share e.g. database plugin -> DataGrip. b. Move their userbase to subscriptions -> much larger and more stable revenue stream. c. Google migrated from Eclipse to IntelliJ for their Android IDE. Then Kotlin blew up and became adopted as the official primary language on Android, which created a massive ecosystem and drives lots of users to use IntelliJ and then upgrade to Ultimate.

mekster 4y ago

I think you just didn't care to find alternatives to your environment nor read much of HN comments on programming editor topics. It's been about 5 years since I decided to switch to all products pack from PHPStorm which I used for a few years.