Microsoft touts Visual Studio Code as a Java juggernaut Microsoft reckons Visual Studio Code has a community of more than 2.5 million Java developers, and coming up next for them is full support for Java 21 and changes intended to improve reliability and stability. Java has dropped down the TIOBE index from number one in 2020 to number four in the latest iteration. It now hovers …
So, I made the decision to move my dev environment 'into' WSL2 from NTFS (recently) because python, node, ruby are also things I'm working with as well as rust + java.
IntelliJ on Windows, for all its support for WSL2, didn't play nicely on my machine and essentially all gradle projects that are now in WSL2 break with a "can't find a main-class org.jetbrains.something.or.other.gradle.tooling.Proxy".. It was just meant to work according their docs; searching for the missing main class didn't give me much help either since I'm running the latest IntelliJ community edition.
I have moved to vscode (java+rust); running vscode with the WSL remote server or whatever is has been frictionless, and the java & rust projects 'just work' in the manner that I expect them to.
'yeah but, you could run WSL2 in Wayland mode, and install IntelliJ like that', or 'mutter some arcane invocation that magically has some kind of setting that makes it work'; I'm just fighting against the tooling by then, which stops me from getting actual shit done.
The stats would suggest that:
"Since VSCode has appeared, Java has taken a massive downfall in popularity. So from this we can infer that VSCode is bad for Java..."
I know they are unrelated properties but I think Microsoft being able to swing a good narrative is impressive in terms of their marketing prowess.
Yeah, I'm not sure about their narrative on this one. I love VS Code, and don't care for Java. I'm not sure that VS Code can go far enough to meet what IntelliJ offers... Java Dev just triggers heavily on an IDE. And frankly, I'd rather see Microsoft improve the C# experience in Code.
I think the decline in Java usage is more about Go, Rust and Python gaining ground. Not to mention C# actually being open source now.
My own use of VS Code is nearly as much time in the integrated shell, I don't use a lot of extensions all that heavily.
Agree just use IntelliJ. I had have been a 10y suffering Eclipse user before making the switch. Suffers from too much design by committe whereas IntelliJ feels is designed by developers for developers.
As a polygot software developer, I consider myself as primary a Java developer, despite spending over 300% more time developing in Scala and Kotlin over the past few years, all non-Andriod projects.
I don't really see much of a distinction or separation now as it all just works and interops.
Maybe they should add the Kotlin into the Java ranking numbers instead of treating it as a separately ranked figure, those headline number don't tell the whole truth.
I welcome the diversity of effort from the VS camp to improve the experience there.
How do they know 2.5 million MS VS Code users are doing Java projects? Did they do a survey or something?
And really, who would even trust a Microsoft development IDE near Java after all the shady things Microsoft did to divert Java developers to their own proprietary language?
And that tactic was what triggered the fall of Borland which was a well respected software development vendor. Sure it's all old news but it is the same Microsoft.
Just look at the tricks they are playing to lock out developers on Windows from using non-Microsoft cloud services.
That zebra has the same stripes today as it had 30 years ago.
You can survey with github: look for the presence of vscode editor configs in public projects, and then see what languages those projects use. Extrapolate that out to the number of active VS Code users you have (easily known based on the number of update checks Microsoft receives), and maybe you get 2.5 million.
VSCode itself has about 15~16 million users, which is perhaps 60% of the global software developer population. But “use” and “use exclusively” aren’t the same thing: I use VSCode myself quite a bit on codebases to do safe, large-scale text-mangling quickly, but when I’m actually programming, I prefer a real IDE, and for my tastes that’s Qt Creator (C++/Qt), JetBrains CLion (C/C++) or IntelliJ (Java), or the full-fat Visual Studio (for C#).
IMHO netbeans is the best java IDE hands down, the layout is intelligent and intuitive, it has a full featured swing WYSIWYG editor. It has great support for PHP and C/C++ if you use the old 8.2 plugin.
Of course swing might look a bit dated if you are doing GUI's, and the other hand it's an easy way to do UI's that are not insane
In the past I used to use a plethora of editors/IDEs on Linux/Windows: VisualStudio (C++/C#), C++ Builder, Eclipse (Java/C++), JDeveloper, NetBeans (Java/C++), Kate (C++), PyCharm, IntelliJ, CLion, QtCreator, KDevelop, Notepad++, etc. Nowadays all that 'mess' is mostrly solved by VSCode/VSCodium. It is a very good 'IDE' on average for C++/Java/C#/Typescript/Rust/Python and for several file types. I am a linux guy, but I have to work on Windows :-( so, at least for me, VSCode is the right tool (even for Java/Spring Boot; and yes, IntelliJ is superior in many ways, but not in all).
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