10 ms·

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

CydeWeys 11y ago
Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.
- adevine 11y ago
  Exactly. I also wonder whether it would even have been possible to start Jetbrains in the US. Being based in the Czech Republic gave them a much lower cost structure, and in the beginning, competing with Eclipse's free price tag meant noone could ever have supported a sizable company in the US.
  - naa42 11y ago
    Czech Republic is just a registration place. JetBrains is based in St Petersburg, Russia. Until recently all the developers were in St Petersburg, then some people moved to Germany. JetBrains was started as a small startup and then absorbed people from St Petersburg office of Borland.
_ak 11y ago
I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-changer that triggered great change in Borland.
- kjhsadklj1 11y ago
  I'm curious - what do you think / what did you see in your experience - that was the reason people chose a Borland product over another choice?
- Conjoiner 11y ago
  >"there was nothing they could have done" How about creating a better product worth paying for? Eclipse was and is not exactly universally well liked.
  - mreiland 11y ago
    agreed, Loved the old Borland compilers, hated JBuilder.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.
  - lvillani 11y ago
    > I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...] Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio? Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides a vastly better experience). Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try. I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans, eclipse, visual studio or xcode. I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on a floppy.
      - harkyns_castle 11y ago
        Metrowerks Codewarrior has fond memories for me too (although I have never had a problem with Eclipse aside from bloated J2EE bundles like WSAD etc. It's easy to set it up to be quick and unobstrusive I've found).
  - izacus 11y ago
    Well you're lucky that Eclipse has essentially been deprecated as an Android IDE. Also Ant? Gradle and Maven are significantly more versatile and better supported for Android development (with Gradle being a first-class citizen now) and I honestly don't advise you to torture yourself with Ant.
jquery 11y ago
A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing all the plugins they should?)
- _d8fd 11y ago
  What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    I mostly develop in Sublime/Atom + iTerm2, but after working in RubyMine for several months, it feels like I lost some sensation in a limb. (and I only explored the bare essentials) Biggest wins for me: Cmd-click pretty much anything and jump to the file, even if it's a gem somewhere outside of my app. Code hinting. The way a Rails console behaves.
  - thejosh 11y ago
    I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?
    - malyk 11y ago
      Ruby web dev here...I pretty much use liberal puts statements (actually the awesome_print) gem. It's never really been a problem for me with ruby. 2001-2007 I was primarily a Java developer and the debugger was essential. But since switching to ruby in 2007 I've just never felt the need. I think it's probably the cycle time...we were using BEA weblogic as our Java server and cycle times weren't quick so you didn't want to waste time and needed to be able to step through the code. With ruby/rails it's almost instant to see your logging so I've never even looked into how to use a debugger in ruby.
    - 11y ago
crististm 11y ago
If professional software developers don't get to have professional IDEs for their languages, then the software quality will continue to stay at the present levels. The mentality of "good-enough and not even that" is pervasive. When IDEs market is dead, this means the professional pride of the industry as a whole is nonexistent. (Eclipse does not even come close to amateur level, let alone professional. Vim and emacs which you have to configure yourself to come close to a decent level of proficiency don't count either - I'm using all three)
kriro 11y ago
Slightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]
- mahmud 11y ago
  Please don't! IntelliJ is both perfect, and very affordable. Google will only ruin it by neglecting for a few years, before shuttering it down. JetBrains, stick to what you do best.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  The only way I can see this kind of acquisition make sense would be in order to push Kotlin as a Java replacement on Android. It looks like Google intends to go the Java 8 way though, so that's not terribly likely.
alcalde 11y ago
JetBrains sells $99 IDEs like in the Turbo Pascal days. The current producer of Borland's Delphi, Embarcadero, sell the product for a minimum of $1000 plus a subscription is now required to get ANY bug fixes at all! Accessing a client/server database is a $500 add-on (or upgrade to the $2000 package), etc. Delphi Professional + c/s add-on plus subscription runs about $2147 the last time I checked! Who in 2015 pays $2,147 to be able to develop software? Note that you'll need to spend even more to target mobile and there's no Linux solution yet either. Delphi users refuse to accept it (or that mobile or web are here to stay, or that there are better VCS systems than subversion, which is the only VCS that Delphi's IDE fully supports) but the days of the expensive, proprietary IDE are indeed dead. MS releasing a free VS Community Edition was just the final nail in the coffin.

Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.

adevine 11y ago
Exactly. I also wonder whether it would even have been possible to start Jetbrains in the US. Being based in the Czech Republic gave them a much lower cost structure, and in the beginning, competing with Eclipse's free price tag meant noone could ever have supported a sizable company in the US.
- naa42 11y ago
  Czech Republic is just a registration place. JetBrains is based in St Petersburg, Russia. Until recently all the developers were in St Petersburg, then some people moved to Germany. JetBrains was started as a small startup and then absorbed people from St Petersburg office of Borland.

_ak 11y ago

I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-changer that triggered great change in Borland.

kjhsadklj1 11y ago
I'm curious - what do you think / what did you see in your experience - that was the reason people chose a Borland product over another choice?
Conjoiner 11y ago
>"there was nothing they could have done" How about creating a better product worth paying for? Eclipse was and is not exactly universally well liked.
- mreiland 11y ago
  agreed, Loved the old Borland compilers, hated JBuilder.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.
- lvillani 11y ago
  > I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...] Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio? Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides a vastly better experience). Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try. I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans, eclipse, visual studio or xcode. I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on a floppy.
    - harkyns_castle 11y ago
      Metrowerks Codewarrior has fond memories for me too (although I have never had a problem with Eclipse aside from bloated J2EE bundles like WSAD etc. It's easy to set it up to be quick and unobstrusive I've found).
- izacus 11y ago
  Well you're lucky that Eclipse has essentially been deprecated as an Android IDE. Also Ant? Gradle and Maven are significantly more versatile and better supported for Android development (with Gradle being a first-class citizen now) and I honestly don't advise you to torture yourself with Ant.

jquery 11y ago

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing all the plugins they should?)

_d8fd 11y ago
What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  I mostly develop in Sublime/Atom + iTerm2, but after working in RubyMine for several months, it feels like I lost some sensation in a limb. (and I only explored the bare essentials) Biggest wins for me: Cmd-click pretty much anything and jump to the file, even if it's a gem somewhere outside of my app. Code hinting. The way a Rails console behaves.
- thejosh 11y ago
  I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?
  - malyk 11y ago
    Ruby web dev here...I pretty much use liberal puts statements (actually the awesome_print) gem. It's never really been a problem for me with ruby. 2001-2007 I was primarily a Java developer and the debugger was essential. But since switching to ruby in 2007 I've just never felt the need. I think it's probably the cycle time...we were using BEA weblogic as our Java server and cycle times weren't quick so you didn't want to waste time and needed to be able to step through the code. With ruby/rails it's almost instant to see your logging so I've never even looked into how to use a debugger in ruby.
  - 11y ago

crististm 11y ago

If professional software developers don't get to have professional IDEs for their languages, then the software quality will continue to stay at the present levels. The mentality of "good-enough and not even that" is pervasive. When IDEs market is dead, this means the professional pride of the industry as a whole is nonexistent. (Eclipse does not even come close to amateur level, let alone professional. Vim and emacs which you have to configure yourself to come close to a decent level of proficiency don't count either - I'm using all three)

kriro 11y ago

Slightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]

mahmud 11y ago
Please don't! IntelliJ is both perfect, and very affordable. Google will only ruin it by neglecting for a few years, before shuttering it down. JetBrains, stick to what you do best.
on_and_off 11y ago
The only way I can see this kind of acquisition make sense would be in order to push Kotlin as a Java replacement on Android. It looks like Google intends to go the Java 8 way though, so that's not terribly likely.

alcalde 11y ago

JetBrains sells $99 IDEs like in the Turbo Pascal days. The current producer of Borland's Delphi, Embarcadero, sell the product for a minimum of $1000 plus a subscription is now required to get ANY bug fixes at all! Accessing a client/server database is a $500 add-on (or upgrade to the $2000 package), etc. Delphi Professional + c/s add-on plus subscription runs about $2147 the last time I checked! Who in 2015 pays $2,147 to be able to develop software? Note that you'll need to spend even more to target mobile and there's no Linux solution yet either. Delphi users refuse to accept it (or that mobile or web are here to stay, or that there are better VCS systems than subversion, which is the only VCS that Delphi's IDE fully supports) but the days of the expensive, proprietary IDE are indeed dead. MS releasing a free VS Community Edition was just the final nail in the coffin.