[hinkley]

I still use Jetbrains but I don’t really push it on other people the way I used to. It was always a pig, but it was less of a pig than Eclipse, which I haven’t met anyone who still uses it in a long time, so now Jetbrains is “the pig “.

I figured the targeted versions would fix that, but I haven’t found that to be the case, or at least not for mature projects.

Point is, VSCode isn’t trying to be good, it’s just trying to be better than Jetbrains. Which is a nearly universal failure mode in this industry, and why it takes us so long to get good tools. If someone throws a terrible tool out, we have to go through two or three generations of replacements before someone finally has an original idea that isn’t built on the misguided one we started with.

The bones for running other languages or enhanced Java on the JVM were laid down in Java 1.2, but the first assembler built for Java was terrible. It wasn’t even a macroassembler, you had to do your own pointer arithmetic for the stack and IIRC for the constant pool. It was two assemblers later before we got one that made me say, “this is actually pretty usable” and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the number of JVM languages basically doubled a short time after that. We could have had all of this in 1998, not 2008.