Comment by airesQ 5 days ago
Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
I doubt there is much overlap between people happily paying for cursor and people upset Zed took VC funding.
IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.
VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.
Another big point was they implemented their own parsers for everything which allowed them to make nifty things - the refactor features way back in the early 10s was miles ahead of everyone else - but then LSP happened and that advantage is diminishing and becoming a liability
>IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc. I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij. RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
I don't write Ruby, but I write Go and C, and C++ and I was left facing a new license. For no reason at all. It's the same debugger and the same code base, you just need to hook into gdb or lldb instead of all the other ones.
Like I said it's only one of the problems, read the rest.
The paid version of Intellij has never lost anything. Pretty much everything the specialized IDEs can do, Intellij can do too, though maybe some features lag. CLion, Rubymine etc are just less expensive specialized versions.
I'm sure the free version has lost some things.
Its been a long time since I used CLion but it was the best C++ IDE by a huge margin.
>>Is IntelliJ "bad"?
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
Not many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding.
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.