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Comment by kyawzazaw | Hacker News Reader

Why is JetBrains a rare success compared to others?

I suppose it's hard to sell tools to people whose job it is to build tools, e.g. John Resig could never have sold jQuery because someone would have just written a feature compatible version for free. (edit, well the source is visible so that might be a bad example)

One thing coders do poorly is UX. Most things I’ve seen that are UX heavy done right are commercial and light-years ahead of open-source versions.

Mostly because they are really, really good, and they don't ask much for it.

I think I pay them less than $150 for a yearly subscription to their entire toolset, which is a price point that makes it stupid not to buy them. ReSharper is well worth a cup of coffee a week, by itself, and then there is DataGrip, WebStorm, IntelliJ, profilers, decompilers, and other stuff thrown in.

I also enjoy their universal subscription but I recommend trying Rider if you like ReSharper. Outside of small solutions, I find that ReSharper requires more patience than I can muster. The type-and-wait is significantly worse than I remember from classic Mac all-in-ones from the early/mid 90s.

Type and wait is literally the main reason I do most of my actual work in VS Code now instead of Visual Studio... I can't stand the full vs experience... code is just nicer imo.

What do you mean by type and wait ?

JetBrains seems to do a good job sticking with the core audience of in-the-trenches coders, instead of trying to expand in a way that feels corporatey and enterprisey.

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