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pjmlp

What boosts a language is having a tool vendor alongside an OS vendor shipping it.

It would be a bit hard for Clojure to achieve that level of support.

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Of course you are right, but it all started with the tight integration with Jetbrains editing package.

Kotlin and InteliJ are from JetBrains, no wonder.

They are trying to be the next Borland with Kotlin as their Turbo Pascal (#KotlinEverywhere), and got Google Android's team as the language godfather.

Scala isn’t owned by a company making tools, but in the recent years it has experienced a big transformation on the tooling space with projects such as mill, Ammonite, Metals, Scalafix or Bloop. I’m obviously biased because I’ve worked on some of these tools but having worked with other programming languages lately I’d dare to say Scala tooling is solid and good. In some regards, we have better developer workflows than Kotlin and Java developers have and there’s a huge stream of innovation in this space.

It has one of the best Swiss universities, and Twitter, sponsoring its development thought.

Most of GraalVM improvements regarding Scala have been thanks to Twitter.

Rails and Textmate had a similar synergy without the direct connection Kotlin and IntelliJ have. There is something to the language/editor relationship that can kickstart the ecosystem.

Google tried to acquire JetBrains multiple times in the past but owners didn't want to sell their cash cow; this is their way to have a large influence over them by paying them a lot for Android Studio, making JB CEO happy and supportive. AFAIK JB teams often work at Google offices and vice versa and it looks like a slow mental assimilation process in progress. That doesn't mean they won't change their minds in the future.

Where did you hear that?

Because what I heard is that Google pay JetBrains nothing. They forked IntelliJ Community Edition to make Android Studio and have their own development team, which honestly sounds much more like Google to me.

I talked to some higher ups.

I wonder how they feel now about no taking that Google money. VScode is crippling Jetbrains at a fast pace.

Net profit >$100M and in the process of lowering taxes via restructuring to "tax friendly" countries like Netherlands (new HQ after Prague), while staying private. Also, look at how many IntelliJ/WebStorm etc. templates have links to Google Analytics and similar ("runs best in Chrome") in their default starting projects. Do you think that comes for free? Their main problem is uncontrolled growth they have no clue how to manage; I was told their culture used to be great but now is chaotic as their employee intake accelerated and nobody internally knows how to solve it.

OTOH Google at least doesn't try to kill them outright, just to assimilate them and headhunt their employees, but Microsoft would be happy if they disappeared instantly as many of their clients have an unwanted dependency on Resharper.

I never understood ReSharper love, some people just like to cripple the performance of their machines.

VSCode is winning Javascript developer mindshare, but for most other languages Intellij is still dominant. For example, PyCharm is free and far better than VSCode for Python development. Additionally, Jetbrains products are free to use for people in education, which has pulled a lot of users.

JetBrains won't be able to stay doing free beer forever though, hence why one then only gets proper support for Kotlin/Native on CLion.

JetBrains lost it when they forced developers into subscriptions and later slightly backtracked (i.e. you can use 1 year old version after subscription expires), but still offered a worse deal than they had before. That came with a new CEO and CFO who insisted on "subscriptions are the future" model.

VSCode just filled the void they left wide open. But I suspect Sublime and Atom are the main victims of VSCode.

And that’s a good thing, right? I mean, I always hear Turbo Pascal was terrific.

Yes it was, then Borland decided it wanted to play in the big league and rest is history.

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