[jillesvangurp]

One point that the author fails to mention regarding Jetbrains is that they developed Kotlin and that Intellij at this point is largely implemented in it. Their whole strategy features a lot of Kotlin at this point. So, the best IDE for Java is built by the company that develops a drop in replacement for it. Not a minor point to make. The IDE that Oracle acquired along with Sun (Netbeans) is still there of course but it's rare that I meet someone who even knows what that is.

This is actually also a weakness because there is no good competition in terms of alternative Kotlin IDEs. Eclipse and VS Code have Kotlin plugins but they are nowhere near as good as their Java support. Nice in a pinch if you really can't be bothered to install Intellij.

Java undeniably has great alternative IDEs. I think it's still unrivaled in the wide variety of very decent IDEs and by pretty much every other language. And that has been the case for a long time. Eclipse and Netbeans are still around and both still do a fine job. If you use emacs or vi, there are decent plugins for those as well. VS Code of course has pretty decent support. Kotlin support for all of those is not at the same level.

But one positive thing that has come out of Kotlin (and Scala) keeping the pressure on Oracle is that they have rapidly rolled out a lot of new Java and JVM features in the last few years. JDK 17 is a nice piece of technology with lots of under the hood changes that benefit all JVM languages. So is Graal. I think the efforts to make Java more usable are also going to be nice for people with Java code bases.

Like the author though, Kotlin is my main language at this point.

[hugi]

Kotlin's dependency and relationship with IntelliJ is one of the largest reasons why I don't use it. I really dislike IntelliJ and Kotlin is mostly unusable without it.

I don't see why I should force my company into vendor lock-in (IntelliJ/Kotlin) on what is otherwise an open platform (Java/OpenJDK).

[erokar]

This is unfortunate indeed. I'm hoping the Kotlin language server for VS Code will get some love, it doesn't seem to be working at this point.

[anotherevan]

Yes, this was the main reason I chose Java instead of Kotlin when starting our last big project. Would have loved to use Kotlin, but the vendor lock-in was the deal breaker.

[5e92cb50239222b]

IDEA is 56% Java and 15% Kotlin.

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

[ptx]

Rider, their closed-source .NET IDE, is supposedly written in Kotlin though (except for the parts that are written in C#):

https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2016/01/13/project-rider-a...

[5e92cb50239222b]

Rider is pretty much IDEA customized for dotnet. Code analyzer/autocompletion backend is written in C# running on top of .NET (5 IIRC). I am not affiliated with JetBrains in any way and have no visibility into its internals, but am pretty sure that Rider and IDEA share most of the code (which is obvious to anyone who has spent significant amounts of time in both IDEs).