[ornornor]

> VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.

[Rohansi]

How does the existence of VSCode stop the creation of other editors? The existence of other editors clearly didn't prevent VSCode from being created, so what's different?

[shimman]

Oh easy, you can't compete with a trillion dollar corporation that can subsidize loss leaders. We know there is a substantial market in this space if Zed is able to raised $30mil, but only letting VC or big tech dictate the direction of tooling is extremely troublesome.

I, along with every other person in tech I know, would love to start a company but the biggest risk is lack of health insurance; which is why things like medicare for all are sorely needed if we want to improve the space by introducing more competition.

Which is why you also need to specifically tax companies like MSFT to publicly subsidize alternatives.

I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers? Why should economic value both be dictated and captured by a small set of people? I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

[Rohansi]

Still doesn't make any sense. Visual Studio (not Code) has been available since the 90s. The free Community edition has existed since 2014. Sublime Text, Atom, etc. came during that time and did just fine.

> I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers?

I don't think a lack of developers is holding them back. They just don't appeal to most people because they run in a terminal or are vim/emacs-focused.

> I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

You'd likely end up with the same result. That grant money would come from a finite pool of money, how much money do you think would go to editors targeting niche users vs. editors with broad appeal?