[terminalbraid]

> what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness

Seriously. This is where Jetbrains went astray. Their original programmers I think were pretty high quality, but their product people are clearly so pants-on-head clueless that they wouldn't know a golden goose if it crushed them under metric tons of golden eggs. Good things don't power-law scale and "let's make 1000 forked IDEs and 50 really weird infrastructure servers" isn't a winning strategy. It's how you bury yourself in tech debt.

> I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE.

I mean, that's what launched Jetbrains in the first place. Google needed proper development tools for Android and a language more modern than Java at the time to support it. So we got Android Studio and Kotlin. They dumped a bunch of money into them and this is what we got once they started to get more independent.

[freeone3000]

I was using IntelliJ before Android came along, and Android Studio was Eclipse-based until Android 4.x (and Java-based well after that!). Kotlin was an alternative to Java 1.6, already fairly late, and wasn’t well supported on android until much later. Before ART, Android didn’t even run Kotlin outside of trivial programs because of the dex classfile limit!